Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
Welcome to DDOcast. We hope you enjoy your visit.


You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free.


Join our community!


If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features:

Username:   Password:
Add Reply
Ask the Devs Transcripts; read the transcripts here
Topic Started: Feb 12 2008, 06:38 AM (1,737 Views)
Jerry
Member Avatar
The Host Of DDOcast.
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
Here's the first "Ask the Devs" transcript for the inaugural segment. I will be posting up transcripts a week or so after each segment airs, depending on how much time I have to put this sort of thing together. I'm slow when it comes to transcriptioning (is that a word?), so cut me some slack...

Anyway, here it is!

###

Ask The Devs, Episode 1
Originally aired on DDOcast, Episode 53, on February 9th, 2008


DDOcast: First episode! So, this'll be our, our "guinea pig" test run here to see how this all goes. I really appreciate everyone being here. Let me go around the room and introduce people here. First up we have DDO Senior Producer Kate Paiz. How you doing Kate?

Kate: I'm good! How are you!

DDOcast: Doing good! I really appreciate you taking some time with us here this afternoon. Also with me is DDO Lead Designer Eladrin. How ya doing Eladrin?

Eladrin: Good! Glad to be here.

DDOcast: All right, I really appreciate you being on the show. We've also got DDO Producer Glin. How's it going, Glin?

Glin: It's going good! And, hey, happy one-year anniversary to you. Long time listener, first time caller...

DDOcast: All right, (chuckles), awesome. Also with me is Quest Designer Eldorudo. How's it going, Eldorudo.

Eldorudo: It's going great, Jerry. It's good to talk to you again.

DDOcast: Yeah, GenCon was the last time I got to say hi to you! And that was awesome, too. All right, so that's the group with us here for the first segment of "Ask the Devs". We've got a big long list of questions, so let's get to it in just a second here, but just wanted to let you know that if you have a question for "Ask the Devs", just send it in to me at ddocast@gmail.com, that's ddocast@gmail.com. Be great if you would tag it with an "Ask the Devs" thing, just so I know where you want this to go, and if you want to give me a name that I can use while I read your question on the air here, that's good too. But not required. All right, let's get started here.

The first question comes from Ralg Ironfist, who says "When are we going to get another State of the Game address? And when might we see some guild amenities like guild housing and guild banks?

Kate: So, the state of the game address was meant to be something that happened on a yearly basis a lot like the State of the Nation that the President does, so I'm anticipating getting another one out to everybody at the end of February or the beginning of March so we can look back and see what we've been doing the last year and look forward and understand what's coming down the pike for us in the next year.

For the second half of that question, in terms of guild amenities like guild houses and banks it's definitely something we're talking about - it's not in active development right now, so I don't have a timeline that I can give players in terms of when that's coming out, but it is something we are really interested in getting done and we're just trying to figure out what the right implementation and next steps on that are.

DDOcast: All right, well that sounds good. I really appreciate that. I know a lot of people will be looking forward to that guild housing whenever it gets there and State of the Game - I guess, it what, makes sense. Second year anniversary here and do it on the anniversary, so...

Kate: Exactly.

DDOcast. All right, Adam writes in to say "how likely is it that we will see some ability to customize our character's look after character creation?" Ah, this person's curious both about things like changing the hairstyle, changing the appearance and the color of his armor. I can hear Rowanheal right now, "I want to change my armor to pink!" (hehe)

Kate: Basically, you know, we don't have, again, we don't have a concrete timeline around changing your physical appearance in terms of changing your hair, or your skin, or your eye color. Um, that is a request that we get a lot and it's something we are definitely interested in doing, but we have kind of a full plate for us the next six months and we're not looking to introduce that in that timeline.

But, we are looking to do some (digital blip) craft system with the Eldritch Device of allowing you to customize your armor color. So, I think that the players can look forward to seeing that, again, associated with that, but it is something that is in active development, versus the other one, which is just in "conversing" development versus active.

DDOcast: All right, so we're closer than ever to getting that pink armor then. (chuckles)

Kate: (chuckles) Exactly.

Eldorudo: Vast and Mysterios...

DDOcast: Yeah, exactly - Vast and Mysterious. Someday I'm going to have to ask about what the history of that one there is.

Glin: That's actually all Tolero, she's the one that created that term.

DDOcast: See, I suspected as much...(chuckles)

DDOcast: All right. Andrew writes in to say "Would you consider adding a difficulty substantially harder than elite to existing quests at all? For example, something like an epic difficulty setting for limited quests, so for example Tempest Spine would become a level 17 to 18 quest?"

So, I don't know. We've already seen (I think) some changes to elite, what with the shrines only being usable once as opposed to reusable on normal. And I know actually from running Coalescence Chamber on Elite, that Elite's become more Elite here with Mod 6. But, uh, what do you think? Could we see an Epic difficulty setting?

Eladrin: I think that the systems that have changed, such as the difficulty checks with traps and the amount of damage they do on Elite, and also a great amount of that desire, Elite really is becoming more Elite, especially at the higher level quests. It's already a substantial challenge compared to normal and hard.

DDOcast: Yeah, that's true. So maybe not then, huh?

Glin: Just to add to that....the devs have over the last year tried to answer some of those player requests for the variety and the challenges in the upper levels. So, I think we'll see a little more of that variety carried out in all of our new stuff. As people start to complete this latest raid in Mod 6, going into Elite is going to be a more challenging thing and that variety they are looking for will be more apparent between Normal, Hard and Elite. You also see that a little bit in the Black Abbot.

DDOcast: Yeah, I can say that's probably true.

Eladrin: Also, with The Shroud's raid, um, the experience that you have each time through will be somewhat different.

DDOcast: Yeah, that's true! I read some press there that you can see some, say, different monsters and that depending on which time you go in there. So, that's a pretty cool change, too.

Next question comes from Ray, "Are there any plans to change the flagging mechanics for VON raids, the Against the Demon Queen to bring them into line with other raids and one-time flagging (you know, the Titan and the Reaver)? Now, the new raid, they all have one time requirements, it'd be nice (this guy says) to see the other two raids retroactively changed to be the same way. So, what do you think? Could we see a day where the days of running VONs 1-4 over and over again to do the Dragon might become a thing of the past?

Kate: Well, you know, I have to say unfortunately that changing quests that are live, um, is really complicated, and, you know, given that there are a lot of people in different states we're nervous about doing that because we certainly don't want to disrupt anyone's play experience at present and we're not sure exactly how that translation will go.

So, I definitely say that in the meantime, we're focusing on building new raids, and we're focusing on building more Tempest Spine-like raids, that are sort of standalone epic feel without having to fight through all of it, but we do not have any plans to go back and retrofit the kind of the new mechanics to the old raids.

DDOcast: Sure. Adam writes in to say, "Why doesn't DDO feature animation for ranged weapons? Like, say, if you have fire arrows why isn't there fire coming off the arrow during flight? You want to please ranged players so add animation to flight paths!"

I think I actually may know the answer to this one, but let's hear what you guys have to say.

Eladrin: Much of that is actually performance-related, and also with the increased ranged weapon speeds in Module 6, you really wouldn't notice the particle affects quite as much. A little while ago, in the Marilith fight, the archers there had flaming arrows that left weapons trails, and it proved to be too much of a burden for many of the people playing the game.

DDOcast: Yeah, that's what I suspected is that it would really bog the client down and that sort of thing, or at least bog down people's computers, if nothing else, and cause some performance issues. But maybe, maybe someday in the future when us in the United States get our 50 megabyte Internet connections, maybe we could add that one in. (chuckles)

Glin: We really want to be able to please a wider audience of players and not just demand them to go out and spend more money on hardware and that sort of thing.

DDOcast: All right, uh, Blackskull writes in to say, "When are changlings coming to the game?" This has been one of his big questions for a while now, so I'm glad we could get it answered here on "Ask the Devs". So, what do you think? Are we going to see some changlings?

Kate: Uh, you know, Changelings are not sort of on our "this year" priority list in terms of development. We're definitely focusing, again, on the monk, on the half-orc, half-elf and druid. Definitely want to finish the core Player's Handbook before we drift into sort of the Eberron stuff. But - next year -we can talk about these things, so why don't we hold on that feature for a DDOcast to come, but say that definitely, unfortunately not in this year.

DDOcast: Sure, sure. Next question is for Eladrin here. Nicholas writes in to say, "many Necromancers exist in the game. Some of them are undead. They can be both good and evil. Are there any plans to add more Necromancy-type elements into the game or update spells like Create Undead?"

Eladrin: Absolutely. We're continuously adding more abilities and spells into the game and I would expect updates to spells such as Create Undead and Summon Monster to be in future modules.

DDOcast: All right, Litz writes in to ask, "What is your position on implementing Trebuchet? Either as a static NPC quest content, mobs only, something usable by players, or any combo." By the way, I looked up Trebuchet online as well and its a Medieval engine of war with a sling for hurling missiles, kind of a catapault basically, so...I don't know? Could we see things like catapaults in DDO?

Eladrin: Well, while I'd really love to have Trebuchet as a quest-giver, (laughter), fans of Trebuchets may find something to their liking in a future module, although not necessarily in precisely that format.

DDOcast: Ah, that's interesting.

Glin: I would say our prototypes of the Trebuchet actually took up fifteen inventory slots, so we just had to pull it out.

DDOcast: (Chuckles) Yeah, maybe you could actually sort of use it as a teleportation device, for the non-caster types. You know, load the dwarf up into the Trebuchet and send him into the Vale of Twilight.

Eladrin: Straight to Meridia with you.

Glin: We were thinking of a blanket toss spell as well but it just wasn't as popular in testing.

DDOcast: I think it sounds like a good idea...all right, this next one - a bit of a specific question here. Ardanroth asks, "in Beta there was a robe that looked tattered and worn, it was a mixture of brown and creams all in different strips of cloth around 2 inch long. Is this robe in the release or are there any plans to make it? Although it was designed to look rubbish, it did it very well, and was a good, bad looking robe."

I don't know, I guess I could see maybe something like this being used for role players and, I don't know, people who just want to look, uh, look a little ragged there. So do you know what robe they're talking about?

Glin: Yeah, you know, I actually know what they are talking about. It just came down to a cloth resource issue - we just had to cut them up to use 'em for underwear! (laughter) So, they actually are in the game as your newbie character starter underwear!

DDOcast: All right, hey, good deal. Gengulphus asks here, "Since the outdoor explorer areas have been a hit, what are the chances of seeing, say, something like mounts" - ya know, a more "seamless Xen'drik" this guy describes it as - he says he knows some people don't really like lengthy travel but others kind of want that.feel of big content. Those who don't want it - maybe you could just add some teleporters, this guy says, so that it would be no different than it was now. So, what do you think, could we see a half-hour walk to the quests?

Kate: You know, one of the things we're thinking of around that is the nature of the way our game works, we're not able to make a seamless environment the way, you know, other games, other MMO's especially, work. But we are going to be trying to connect more outdoor areas together, so you can walk from the Harbor, into Cerulean Hills, into Searing Heights, back into the Market, right, so that we're connecting those outdoor zones. So that while there are still teleports between them, which of course the basic mechanic of our game relies on, you'll still be able to experience more of the outdoor worlds without having to kind of go back and forth to the city. And then again, for those who aren't looking for that environment, there are still going to be teleport NPC's, and teleport environments, so they can, you know, short cut to what they're looking for.

DDOcast: Oh, that sounds great. I think that uh, that should, uh, you know, do a, do a good ways, uh, to appease this guy's, you know, thoughts there. And you know we should mention here that with Mod 6 the new Vale of Twilight, I mean, that's a really big area. It's going to take you a while to wander around that thing if you want to, so.

Kate: There's no question that the outdoor experience of our world is very important to us. You know, at launch, we had a lot of Stormreach to find, but as we continue to grow as a game we're going to continue to explore the outer areas of Xen'drik and really understand sort of how that sort of continent, you know, comes to life for our players. So this is definitely something that is very important to us. I'm glad it's important to Gengulphus and to other players as well.

Glin: It might also be another use for the Trebuchet! (laughter)

DDOcast: That's right! Trebuchet! I'm going to have to, I think that's my word of the day here is "Trebuchet". (chuckles)

One final question here and this one comes from Alexander Illusionist, and just to save some time here I'm going to just kind of condense this question down a bit. He wants to know about Druids and prestige classes, whether or not they might be able to come into the game, and, you know, basically, what's the plan to maybe get those in as quickly as he can.

Kate: You know, we're definitely looking to Druids after, um, after the Monks. I don't have a specific, again, timeline for delivery on that, though we are very hopeful, um, for sort of the first half of next year at the latest. There's no question that the Druids are important to us. Um, what was the other part of the question, I'm sorry...

DDOcast: Prestige classes.

Kate: Prestige classes is definitely an area that we're going to be looking at when we hit the level cap increase, so once you get players to (Jerry says - level 20 I believe, there was a digital blip again) then we're going to start looking into that. Again, it's sort of Monk first, and then we're going to choose between half-orc, and half-elf and druid next, and then kinda get to finishing that, and then get to prestige classes. So, it's definitely on our horizon, and we're looking into it, but we don't have concrete dates yet.

DDOcast: All right, that's our first list of Ask the Devs questions, we've got plenty more to get to. If we didn't get to your question, don't worry about it! It's still "on the list" and will probably be answered in a future episode here of "Ask the Devs".

Before I let you guys go, I just wanted to congratulate you on an excellent job on Mod 6 here, "The Thirteenth Eclipse". Really it rolled out well, you know, the update was no problem, the content is great, the raid is fantastic, got a lot of nice press as well and everything, so, I don't know. I guess, uh, should give ya guys a pat on the back and have a happy weekend here knowing that Mod 6 really went out and is wowing the players here.

You know, Mod 6 is one of those things that you've obviously have been working on it for a long time and it must feel good to know that once it's finally, say, released to the live servers and everything that, that you're getting the real nice positive response that you're getting here.

Kate: Absolutely. You know, we're really proud of the work that we've done there. We're extremely pleased how our players are responding to it right now. You know, this is going to be a great year for us: we've just a ton of plans, and this is just the beginning. We're going to keep releasing great content and really look forward to our players enjoying it as much as we have been developing it.

DDOcast: All right, just want to thank Kate Paiz for coming out for "Ask the Devs" here, I really appreciate you taking a few minutes for us.

Kate: It's absolutely our pleasure. We look forward to doing this with you for many weeks to come. It's definitely a great opportunity for us to talk to our players and kind of get the word out about what we're doing, and always appreciate your help with that.

DDOcast: Let me just say goodbye to Eladrin here. Good luck on, what, Mod 6.1 and Mod 7 and everything else you've got going on.

Eladrin: Yup. Thank you very much and I'll see you in The Shroud.

DDOcast: Sure, absolutely. And Glin, thanks for being on the show. It's great to have you on.

Glin: Yeah, thanks! We'll see you again.

DDOcast: And I just want to say thank you very much to Eldorudo for taking part in this week's "Ask the Devs".

###


I now work for Turbine!
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Jerry
Member Avatar
The Host Of DDOcast.
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
ASK THE DEVS 2 - Recorded for DDOcast, Episode 58 (air date: March 9th, 2008)

Jerry Snook - host, DDOcast

Glin: DDO Producer
Eladrin: DDO Lead Designer
Keeper: DDO Level Designer
Eldorudo: DDO Quest Designer

also doing behind-the-scenes work and technical help:

Quarion: DDO Community Relations Manager


Jerry: Hello and welcome to the second episode of Ask the Devs! Very much appreciate you listening to the show. Let's go around the room and introduce who we have with Turbine with us this time around. First up we have DDO Producer Glin, how's it going Glin?

Glin: Going very good! Glad to be back. I'm glad you decided that it was safe to invite me back.

Jerry: Oh, yeah! No - it's great to have you back! Very much appreciate it. Also is DDO Lead Designer Eladrin - how you doing Eladrin?

Eladrin: Doing great. Thanks!

Jerry: Also with us is DDO Level Designer Keeper.

Keeper: Hi there!

Jerry: Hey - and it's great to have you on the show. This is the first time I've heard your voice - certainly been reading your posts on ddo.com as well. So, hey - glad to have you with us. Also with us is Quest Designer Eldorudo. How's it going Eldorudo?

Eldorudo: It's going great, Jerry. Glad to be here again, thank you.

Jerry: Cool. And thanks for those promos you sent in for the event this past week too. I know a lot of the listeners, you know, got a kick out of them, so real nice.

Eldorudo: You're welcome. Yeah, we just wanted to throw something together real quick so I thank you for playing them.

Jerry: Yeah, it's great. Okay, let's get right to the questions here.

First question comes from Lloyd who asks, "I have a very simple question to ask: When will half-orcs be added to the game as a playable race? I'm also interested in what type of enhancements they might have?"

I know we've heard quite a bit about half-orcs in the past, can't remember exactly what the status was on those in terms of when they are coming to the game. So who wants to field this one?

Glin: Yeah, as far as the timeline, it's something that's in development now. I know that some of the promo video that we put out showed some wire frame, that we've already been working on the modeling. We don't have a release date - we'd like to get a little closer to starting to polish the playability part but, uh, the half-orcs is definitely going to be a playable, playable option for characters.

Jerry: Ah, cool, cool. Any idea of what sort of enhancements half-orcs might have?

Eldorudo: HALF-ORC SMASH! (chuckles) I'd be very surprised if they didn't have strength-oriented enhancements as well as those that synergized well with the barbarian and ranger classes, uh, and eventually druid.

Jerry: Oh, okay. Alright, Good deal, good deal.

Next question comes from Sarezar, who says, "Will we ever get evil alignments for our characters? If yes, would you provide an alignment respect?" (Jerry: for the people who want to switch sides, I guess, go to the dark side...) "If not, why not? Is there someone or something that doesn't allow you to implement evil alignments?" (Jerry: which he says have been proven to be successful in other games and of course are a part of Dungeons and Dragons)

So, evil alignments - That has to be something, I'm guessing, went back to even the early design of DDO here. Whether or not you should include them, could include them and how it would work, so....what do you think?

Eladrin: There were several reasons behind the exclusion of evil alignments in DDO. One is from the Player's Handbook where it states that the three evil alignments are for monsters and villains, while the first six alignments (lawful good to chaotic neutral) are the standard alignments for player characters. Uh, also, content-wise, an evil party probably wouldn't be as quite as happy going through some of the heroic dungeons and experiences that we have in DDO. Sure they'd be okay with "Purging the Heretics" but the bulk of the content wouldn't be something that is especially geared towards them.

Jerry: Yeah, I'm guessing, a lot it's one of those tricky things. I remember back in my 2nd Edition pen and paper days, the old house rule that we had is that generally alignments don't matter that much - just kind of play the character however you want to play them. But I remember also being in some kind of pick-up pen and paper group where people were real strict on alignment, so it's gotta be kind of tough to know if - would an evil character be even in a party with a good character and visa versa and that kind of thing.

Eladrin: We were fairly light with alignment in DDO. We don't restrict the quests that you can go on. But I believe that the suspension of disbelief needed to have evil characters enjoy the entire experience would be, uh, not the best thing in the world.

Jerry: All right, Drallac asks, "Were the new death penalty affects a unanimous decision on Turbine's part? Or was it as big a debate like it was in the ddo.com forums?"

Eladrin: We thought long and hard about the death penalty changes and had a tremendous number of discussions in-house. Including debates about what we were going to change, what we wanted to do with it, what the philosophy behind a death penalty in an online MMO is. Um, all in all, we're all pretty happy with the changes that were made, so, uh, I guess we're unanimous.

Jerry: I imagine there was quite a bit of debate though. Cuz, I mean, really, the death penalty impacted, a very, uh, well, numerous aspects of the game. I mean you had everything from, say, you had to take into account time of progression, what people like and what they dislike and what's an incentive and disincentive to playing, and all these things. I bet you had to get answers to most of that stuff, huh?

Glin: It was quite a bit of internal debate for, for several months. I do recall when we posted the solution on the web that I was able to find a document, at least an email thread going back a full year on discussing dropping the XP debt. Lots of negative feedback from players in player exit interviews about how it affected their game, and we went with something a little more tried and true, a little more traditional, that we thought that our current players wouldn't hate, because our current players are there because they weren't concerned about the XP debt, in, in some sense.

But it had kind of a negative effect on how long people stayed in-game, because we found that people were dropping out, uh, and waiting for their XP debt to regenerate, and that was a pretty negative experience for people who were trying to keep their parties and their guilds full as well. Um, it wasn't as apparent (I think) from the player side, but it definitely went into our decision-making and helped to turn the tide on anyone who was actually still against that.

Jerry: I know I've, uh, you know, given my thoughts on the show about the death penalty and how it affected me before. I've had a character, let's say, I ran Ghosts of Perdition and it didn't go very well, and it didn't go very well probably five or six times in a row. And so that was a disincentive for me to actually pull out that character. At that point, I was just like "well, let's set this character aside for a week and play someone else, and so I guess that really kind of goes to the core of what you were saying there.

Glin: Yeah, I mean that's definitely an experience that even us as players at home, uh, in our own game, were kind of getting frustrated with.

Eldorudo: Sorry about that Jerry. I'll take the blame for Ghosts of Perdition.

Jerry: (chuckles) No, you can actually blame the other five members of the pickup group I was in. They were a bunch of zergers and it didn't go very well. That's a hard one - that's still one of my harder quests though, but, uh, all right.

Oleg asks, "What is the probability of true random dungeons?" What he's talking about here is a random number of traps, random kinds of traps, random ways of getting to the end of a dungeon. He says, "I understand it can be random only within some parameters, but still it would be so cool to go into a dungeon and not know what awaits you."

Keeper: Uh, unlikely to happen. Unfortunately our world-builder tool's like a pencil, you need someone to wield it. You can do a lot with it but it's not very good at spitting out random things on its own.

Jerry: Now, you guys have done sort of, uh, in I believe in some of the new Vale quests, is it "Rainbow in the Dark" where there are times where there are traps there and some times when there are not. So I guess we've at least seen sort of random trap generation, things of that nature, but, uh...

Eldorudo: Players keep asking for random content but they've got lots of it in "Rainbow in the Dark". Cuz, see, that thread was one of the longest we've had in a while, so apparently people like having that element of surprise, "Is it random? Is it not?"

Jerry: Yeah.

Eladrin: Also in The Shroud we've introduced a lot of randomness with, uh, which Lieutenants would show up in the second phase, which room you end up in (EDITOR'S NOTE: in the third phase). Some limited randomness.

Jerry: Yeah, and I bet we could probably see more of that kind of thing in the future here too.

Glin: Yeah, I think what Keeper was speaking to is more of the, uh, the actual dungeon creation of people want to see a kind of randomness that's the room kind of growing on its own, in a way, as opposed to this is a room that's mapped out and planned and plotted and architected. The elements in it can be scripted to have the randomness in certain areas, but it can't be too chaotic-random, which is just the next level of going from where we are now with the randomness to sort of chaotic. And then it becomes a big game play issue, uh, when we're not really controlling what the experiences that we want the players to have.

Jerry: Yeah. All right, Steve asks, "What is the status of the fix for greater teleport (that he says) was promised for the next patch after Mod 4?"

In particular here he's referring to the ability to cast greater teleport in public areas. He says a fix for it was announced with Mod 6 but there doesn't seem to be any visible change.

Eladrin: I have some tech requests in on it, uh for, doing things like locking teleport locations until you visited areas, and, uh, some other improvements to the spell. I'm sure that at some point in the future we will be looking at the spell again.

Jerry: Kasmir asks, "Could we have guild-bound items?" Say, things that officers could bind, and then take out of their guild banks, and things of that nature. Maybe more rankings for guilds, different kinds of membership, a guild house, things of that nature. So, what's the latest on guild housing and guild banks?

Glin: You know, Jerry, we've taken a lot of the, the feedback on what players would like to see for guilds and we're actually implementing that in the designs that we're putting together. Um, we don't have an immediate release plan for this one, but guilds and guild support, guild banking, these are things that we recognize is important for the retention and the community spirit, the veteran players helping new players and that sort of thing. There's definitely a value in supporting guilds more than what's in-game currently, so, the player feedback and suggestions like this are definitely something that we want to see as we're, as we're, building these things.

Jerry: Sure, as long as you allow my guild to have a floating castle above the Wavecrest Tavern I'll be happy. (chuckles)

Glin: That's going to cost you some plat, though.

Jerry: Yeah. (laughter) All right, Robbie asks, "I mostly play clerics. Since the launch of DDO, clerics have been missing their domain powers. I know you tried to please clerics with the 'follower of' enhancement line," but he says there's only two of those available to all races and maybe not a lot of diversity in the abilities. So he asks, "Are there any plans to add more 'follower of' enhancement lines, maybe like a Blood of Vol? Or maybe are there any guesses on when we might get domain spells?

Eladrin: Well, there's five total lines of the "follower of" enhancements. Two of them, the Silver Flame and Sovereign Host are available to all the races as they are the dominant faiths in Eberron.

Uh, we do plan on expanding those lines and (have) additional diversification of the enhancements that follow off of the original "follower" enhancements, but at this time we don't intend on adding something like the Blood of Vol.

Similar to the question about evil alignments, uh, I know the Lord of Blades isn't exactly the nicest guy, but at least he works well with adventuring parties (their goals sometimes coincide). The Blood of Vol very rarely has, uh, goals that cooperate very well with the rest of adventuring society. I'm always looking at including more and more options for the different character classes, and clerics and paladins both gain quite a bit from enhancements to the faith lines.

Jerry: Sure. All right, Chad asks, "I'm an aspiring game designer and I'm currently going to college at the Art Institute of Atlanta for a degree in game art and design. Question is what did you guys do to get your jobs?" (chuckles) "What kind of education and areas did you study before being hired at Turbine?" He says, "Basically I want to make sure I'm on the right path by simply asking those who are already in the industry."

Keeper: There are quite a few paths into the industry. I got here by studying illustration in college and I spent six years making art for Turbine before moving over to the design department.

Jerry: So, you mean, what, like Asheron's Call and that kind of thing?

Keeper: Asheron's Call 2 and then Middle Earth Online before it was Lord of the Rings Online.

Jerry: So that's some pretty good advice there. I guess, is there a right way? Is there a wrong way? Maybe the wrong way is to show up for the interview with a bag of money and try to bribe them, huh?

Eladrin: That could work pretty well, actually. (laughter)

Eldorudo: If you're going to show up, Jerry, you got a job.

Glin: Especially if you show up with a bag of money.

Eldorudo: Yeah, exactly, that's what I'm saying. I think we all have different paths. I know mine is kind of like a nontraditional path. Um, I had been working kind of dead-end jobs, you know, nothing that was all that enlightening. So, I decided instead of selling games for an eBay business, I'd wanted to make them. So, I quit my job making decent, well, actually, pretty good money and just became a QA tester making ten dollars an hour. And actually took a job at Turbine over two other companies that had better offers because I wanted to do MMO's. And it obviously paid off because I was in QA for four months and then I went up to Online Community for about six months and now I found my home in design, been here for about a year and a half now.

So, um, my main tip would be to tell people to network, to find, check out the IDGA and your local Game Developers Association and find out when they have meet-and-greets. I know in Boston here they have one once a month and that's how I got into the industry was just going there and meeting people, making contacts, and eventually that's what landed me my job here at Turbine.

Jerry: You know I've heard that before that, say, getting a start in QA can be a good stepping stone to a career in the industry there.

Eldorudo: Yeah, it really is. It's the best way to get in, you know, unless you have a game design degree. And that still doesn't guarantee you anything, but if you do want to get into the industry QA is an excellent way to do it. You basically get to touch all the different departments, you get to write bugs for art, for code, for design and you basically get to interact with all of the different departments. It's an excellent introduction to the industry.

Glin: From a management perspective, you know, I came in as a manager into the console and PC game industry, but my background prior to that was as an engineer. Prior to that I was actually working in recording studios (I had more of a multi-media background). Not all of the managers that work here have that, in my case I have more of a hands-on development background, and then others have come in from the area of having the degree, you know, a business degree, and a real strong keen interest in games, and they too will work their way up into that level.

But there's really two tracks to go, as you come in as an associate level, or as we were just saying the QA. Working your way towards the development, more of the technical hands-on side, or you can take the management track which has to do with more of your people skills and your organization. But really a lot of it stems down to you have to be willing to take those steps to work on something as fun and interesting and creative as working in the game industry.

Jerry: All right. Kind of a related question here and I just thought of this so I don't know if you guys can answer it, but let's say for example this guy wants to get a job at Turbine. I think I've been to the Turbine web site. I believe you actually do post up some jobs there as well, don't you?

Glin: Yeah, absolutely. We're going through a big hiring growth spurt right now. Just put my name on all of the applications...

(laughter)

Kate: Hey!

Glin: Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Um, yeah, people should submit their resumes through the web site, it definitely gets attention there. There's also submitting reels for artists, and, you know, my developers, game developers can submit their reels through that format as well.

Quarion:
(Jerry's note: Quarion was working behind the scenes to get the group Skype chat set up and help the devs with any technical issues during recording...that's why he wasn't introduced at the start.) And, Jerry, they can do that through www.turbinejobs.com and they can also sign up for an email alert through that too to find out when we post new jobs that become available, they can be alerted either for a short time or forever, to find out what new things are opening up at Turbine.

Jerry: All right, so I'm going to kind of spring this next question on you, so I'm not sure, heh, what all we can say about this but let's just kind give this a try and see what we come up with. This has obviously been a really big week in Dungeons and Dragons Online. You guys have been working on a live event all week for Update 6.1 here. This is actually being recorded, I should say, on Friday, uh, it's going to be airing on Sunday, so, so the "Big End" has not happened as of the time of recording this.

But, uh, I just wanted to get your thoughts in general here: Anyone got any thoughts about how they think this week went? Did it go, well I guess like everything, maybe it doesn't go exactly as planned in all aspects, but overall are you guys pretty happy with it?

Keeper: Considering the ways that it could have broken, I'm really happy with it.

(chuckling)

Eldorudo: Yeah.

Jerry: It is some really neat technology there, I mean it's really kind of, um, is it a game-changing technology? I mean, could we see this, at least maybe parts of this sort of implementation, you know, throughout, throughout the rest of the development cycle here at DDO?

Eldorudo: Well, Jerry, just to add onto that I just wanted to commend all the players. I've had a blast reading the forums this week, it's been great just seeing how everybody's getting into the story line.

And sure, there are ways we can improve and make this better in the future, but I really love how everyone's been getting so into it, I love reading the posts. It's been just a joy reading the forums. And I know that everyone, you know not everyone is happy, we can't please everybody, but the positives that we've taken out of this have far outweighed the negatives, to me.

Um, and yeah, in moving forward this is something that we can certainly move out across the game in other ways. This is kind of our "voyage effort", we'll see what happens with it in the future. It's something we can certainly leverage in other avenues of design, but that's still to be determined. I would love to get everyone's take on this once the event is finally over on Saturday evening. When people have a chance to have seen everything unfold before their eyes, I'll be very interested to get, uh, feedback and just to find out how we can do this better moving forward, and what parts were great, what worked, what didn't work, I'm really interested to see what everyone thinks about that.

Eladrin: We've already learned a lot from this experience also that will help us in future events.

Jerry: One thing I was curious about is in terms of the amount of work, frankly, that you guys have to do to put this sort of live event together, how's it compare to, say, putting together a Vale quest? Is it easier? Does it take less time, or is it just about as labor-intensive?

Eldorudo: Well, uh, this one, once again, since it was our maiden voyage it took longer than it's going to take in the future. We really wanted to get it right and nail it. So it did take a pretty good effort on everyone's part that worked on it to do this. And, frankly, if it takes this long again, it's kind of, it would be hard for us to do it to that level. But moving forward it's going to be easier.

I don't expect we're going to be doing events this epic, all the time, it's going to be tough to gauge. We have to kind of weigh how long it takes to the impact of what we're doing. So that's something we're going to evaluate moving forward, but it's certainly something that we are going to use again.

Jerry: All right, so one of the things I guess I noticed with this past week, and this has really been an issue with, uh, player-created events as well. I can think back to the Stormreach Olympics that Merlask organized a while back and things of that nature where you get live events, you get everyone in a room kind of, sort of, doing something out of the norm that you might normally do using the game engine and you get sometimes a bunch of lag.

You know in regards to lag here, it depended of course on the server, and the time of the day and which instance you were in, but I think it kind of showed a little bit maybe the constraints of how, just how much we can do in a public instance. I guess I'm just kind of wondering what your thoughts are on the lag, do you think there might be ways we could improve that in the future? How much frankly is the player base, instance-hopping and things of that, how much did that contribute to it?

Glin: The lag is something that we were testing for, the min and max and sort of 'acceptable' amount. What we looked at was min-specced clients and max-specced clients. A lot of what players were experiencing was client lag for the most part.

There was definitely, you know, we're watching the servers during the big events and we're watching the frame rate of the servers and, and, monitoring those things, and we're not being hit too hard on that side.

The groups of players who were the people that were affected the most, I know in jumping in to run around and observe on some of the bigger nights I stayed away from the crowds and for the most part didn't experience the effects, but I could see people lagging on the bridge by the bank, for example.

So, in general, we found that if you've got a min-specced client, just a, you know, to pick a vague description of a computer, if you've got something that's min-specced and on low to medium settings, once you get more than eight people in your immediate line of sight you'll have a laggier experience. When you get to like twenty people, then you're going to have a lot of halting, and that's something we considered in designing it.

I know that in some of the events like things happen in one particular place, and then when things heated up throughout the week we started to spread things out. But we really didn't have enough clues to players to go out in smaller hunting parties so we were trying to message that through forums, and that's something I think we learned from this event.

But this event had a sample of pretty much every kind of event we can do with this new tech. It's not something that we would do for, for, our regular events. This is definitely a second anniversary, new tech introduced, and we had the jump event, we had the role-playing portion of it going up throughout the week, we had the monster-spawn events and as players know as of today we have the quest event, which is the quest that is only open after the finale. So, those are things we will probably do in smaller doses, and when we do monster-spawn events we will do them in more controlled environments than big public spaces.

But this is definitely something that players want to consider when they're jumping around: instance-hopping is going to put you into an unexpected area. You don't know how many people are in there. You might have a really long delay in actually even getting into that instance if you're landing right on top of ten or twenty other people.

Jerry: Yeah, sure. Is that kind of why maybe we didn't see...uh, you know there were some people that were thinking, well maybe we could see, say, two hundred devils suddenly start pouring out of the portals and things of that nature. Is that related to this in that from a technical perspective that was kind of a difficult thing to do?

Keeper: Yeah, you put monsters in a public place and that's bound to cause lag, unfortunately. Two hundred would be way to many!

Jerry: Yeah, all right. So overall though this event was really, uh, really something. I mean, I haven't seen this obviously in DDO before and I'm not sure that we've seen a lot of this kind of thing in MMO's in general, so, that's got to be pretty exciting at least to, to, if nothing else, at least in the game to be breaking new ground here.

Keeper: Excellent.

Eldorudo: Yeah, it is very exciting Jerry. It's really nice to see that everyone is acting so positively, most people anyhow. You know, we're trying something we poured a lot of time and effort into this and it's really great to see it unfold before our eyes and see everyone enjoying it. We hope we can do more of this in the future but once again it's been really great seeing everyone get so into it.

Jerry:
All right, so, uh, just one more question "out of the blue" here before we wrap things up. When I was organizing this segment of Ask the Devs with you guys, someone had mentioned that this is being taped in a place called the "Star Wars Room". I couldn't let you go without telling me a little bit about that. What makes it "Star Wars"? Do you have a Death Star in there? Are you all required to wear helmets?

(laughter)

Glin: It's as hot as the sun, that's why!

(laughter)

Eldorudo: Actually, we have a bunch of Ewoks in here that bring us food and drinks.

Keeper: I don't know why this room is called "Star Wars".

Glin: Bring me coffee!

Keeper: Most of the rooms here are named after computer games.

Jerry: Is that true?

Eladrin: It's the "Star Wars" computer game.

Jerry: Oh, okay. So do you have a Pac-Man room, a Galaxian room, that kind of thing?

Glin: Yes.

Keeper: There's a Pac-Man Room. Donkey Kong. Frogger.

Eladrin: Dig Dug.

Glin: And we just added a Gauntlet.

Eladrin: Robotron, and there's Robotron. And Asteroids.

Jerry: Cool, which one's the bathroom called?

(laughter)

Eladrin: I call that the men's room.

Eldorudo: It's called the E.T. Atari game.

Jerry: (laughs) Nice.

(laughter)

Jerry: All right. So that's going to wrap it up for this segment of Ask the Devs. I really appreciate you guys coming on the show to answer the questions from the players here and chat with us and have some fun with us.

Just want to say if you're listening to this and asking yourself, "Well how do I submit a question for Ask the Devs?" It's easy. Just send an email to ddocast@gmail.com. Again, that's ddocast@gmail.com. Appreciate it if you'd give me a name that I could use on the air, and maybe tag it for Ask the Devs, just so that I know that it's not, say, a question for the podcast and it's a question for Ask the Devs, although I can usually sort that out so it's not that big a deal if you don't do that, but it's just kind of helpful.

All right, Eladrin - it's great to have you on the show this week. Really do appreciate it.

Eladrin: Thanks a lot. It was a lot of fun!

Jerry: And Keeper - nice to hear your voice and you're doing, you did a lot of outdoor work for Mod 6, right, the Vale of Twilight?

Keeper: That's correct.

Jerry: I just need to say excellent, excellent work on the Vale of Twilight. I think it's one of the, uh, most beautiful parts of DDO here. So I think you really just have done a fantastic job on the outdoor area there.

Keeper: Thank you!

Jerry: Eldorudo - congrats on putting together with Keeper and I'm sure some others too a fantastic event here in DDO this week. Keeping you busy, they're keeping you busy, huh?

Eldorudo: Yeah, certainly kept me busy. And I want to thank everybody for working on it. Certainly it was myself and Keeper worked a lot on it, but Eladrin, and JWB and even some of the artists who players on DDO won't know, uh, contributed a lot so it was definitely a team effort, and it's really nice to see it unfolding before everyone's eyes. I certainly appreciate you having us on and as Veheer would say, "We'll see you tomorrow."

Jerry: Sure. And Glin, great to have you on the show again, look forward to having you on again in the future.

Glin: Thanks. Big fan of the DDOcast myself so I'm just happy to be a part of it. Appreciate it.

###

www.ddocast.com


ALSO: Here's a LINK to a PDF of the transcript.

Jerry
I now work for Turbine!
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Jerry
Member Avatar
The Host Of DDOcast.
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
Ask The Devs #3 Transcript
Recorded for DDOcast Episode 64
April 19th, 2008


Jerry: Hello and welcome to Ask the Devs, the third installment of Ask the Devs here on DDOcast. I really appreciate you taking some time for us. Let's start off by going around the room and saying who we have with us from Turbine. First up is Quarion, Community Relations Manager. How ya doing Quarion?

Quarion: I'm doing great, how you doing Jerry?

Jerry: Good good good. And I appreciate your help to sort of, uh, you help us work some of the technical, behind the scenes stuff here using Skype and conference calling and all that. You do a good job of it and we really appreciate it.

Quarion: Well thanks.

Jerry: Also, no stranger to the show, we have with us Tolero.

Tolero: How's everybody doing?

Jerry: Yeah, it's been a while since you've been on the show and we love to have you on DDOcast. I still get emails every now and then from people saying, "hey, what's Tolero (Merlask) up to there?"

Tolero: Mighty feedback aggregator, MUHAWWW.

Jerry: All right. Also with us is Senior Game Systems Engineer Codog. How ya doing, Codog?

Codog: Doing great.

Jerry: And keeping busy on "The Dog House" thread (on ddo.com). Lot to talk about and lot going on in that little 'ole thread there.

Codog: Oh, it keeps me busy.

Jerry: Also with us is Lead Game Systems Designer Eladrin, how you doing Eladrin?

Eladrin: Pretty good, I'm glad to be here again.

Jerry: Yup. And good to have you on the show. You've been on the show every time and I know that we really appreciate that as well. Also with us is someone who's been on the show before is Producer Glin. How you doing Glin?

Glin: I'm doing pretty good today.

Jerry: Good, good. Weather holding out for ya over on the East Coast?

Glin: Yeah, we're actually starting to get some signs that Spring is on its way. It's actually about a nine month winter up here though, so, uh...

Jerry: Yeah.

Glin: Weather-wise, we're hanging in there.

Jerry: Yup, yup. Well us in Minnesota have that same experience, so. Also with us is Eldorudo. How ya doing Eldorudo?

Eldorudo: I'm doing great Jerry, how are you?

Jerry: Doing good, uh, forgot to mention that you are a quest designer. And, uh, Theragrim - new dev to DDOcast and Ask the Devs, great to have you on the show. It's always cool to meet new folks here.

Tharagrim: Thank you very much. Looking forward to participating.

Jerry: And just to note that you are a Game Systems Designer for Turbine.

Tharagrim: Absolutely.

Jerry: And fairly new, I understand as well.

Tharagrim: Yes, I've been working on the project for about five months, six months now.

Jerry: Cool, cool. Well - glad to have ya working on the game. All right, in the interests of time, I'm going to get right to the questions here:

First question comes from Alfred, who says "Please let us know whether and what more changes will be made to the Abbot Raid?" Basically, what's the deal going on with changes to the Abbot raid and if any changes will be made to get more players to go back to the Necropolis?

Eladrin: Well, with Module 7 we're making some changes to the phase tile room and we've made a couple of minor tweaks here and there to improve the experience. Fixes to bugs, that sort of thing. Uh, there'll also be some additional treasure going in Module 7 and other than that, we'll see. So far there have been a couple of groups that have beaten it. We'd like to keep their experiences and achievements worth talking about, uh, so any changes that we've made we've brought up the original normal difficulty is now hard.

Jerry: Yeah

Eladrin: Uh, but the normal difficulty itself is a little bit easier.

Jerry: Yeah, we had someone on my home server of Sarlona. We had someone on DDO-Europe, and I know a group on the Japanese servers as well, and there may be of course some others out there who just don't publicize themselves so much, but, uh...Yeah! And you said new loot. Did you just say new loot? I think that's the favorite two words you could possibly say to the DDO player base here.

Eladrin: Oh, did I say that out loud? Theragrim knows more about that - he's the one that made it.

Jerry: Oh, really? Okay. All right, Gratch asks, "Lord of the Rings Online got Direct X 10. DX10 shadows and a few other graphics engine features a few books ago. So, for those of us with the "Visa Upgrade" question, are DX10 graphic engine features a possibility for DDO in 2008?

Basically, DX10 is, uh, well, I don't know if I can really explain it. It's sort of the "latest and the greatest" in regards to graphics engines, but you need to have Vista from what I understand in order to run it, so. What do you think, DX10?

Glin: Yeah, DX10 is definitely in DDO's future. It's not actually a limitation on the game engine itself, because it is, it is Turbine technology support. Supported by Turbine technology. It's actually more the art, the shadows, all those things that would really take advantage of DX10 have to be supported in-game and that's a development cycle that's in our near future.

Jerry: Ah, okay. I'm sure people with high-end computers and Windows Vista and that will be pretty glad to see it, so.

All right, Lithic asks, "Are there any plans on refurbishing some of the low-level areas with Explorer Zone tech?" This guy suggests Three Barrel Cove, maybe the Restless Isles would be good ones. "And what about that valley on the way to Faithful Departed, the Ruins of Threnal? More importantly for me," this guy says, "is there any possibility of letting higher-level characters complete the low-level explorer zone quests even if they have to be solo, or get no experience for it or even get empty chests?"

And actually, I suppose I should probably piggyback this with a question from Jocelyn who asked a similar question, "Are there any plans to unlock the explorer zones for higher-level characters?"

Eldorudo: Well, I'll take that one first, Jerry. Players will be happy to know that in Module 7, higher-level players will be able to advance, um, their quests for lower-level wilderness explorer areas. I'm not quite sure how it breaks down, because we'll have to ask Phax, he's the one that programmed it. But basically if you are higher level, like if you want to go into Sorrowdusk, or Searing Heights or any of the other areas you can go in there and advance even if you are a capped character, but there'll just be a penalty for XP. So, that's one thing that we've always wanted to have in there and we're glad that we're finally able to unveil with Module 7.

Jerry: Yeah, that's excellent. Cuz I know especially if maybe you have a character that's just a level or two above or below the range needed, you know, it's good to have that flexibility there, and of course there are us completionists out there that just want the numbers filled up.

Eldorudo: Yeah, exactly. So that's going to be possible. And it also it kinda piggybacks nicely because we've, uh, for Module 7 we've revamped Three Barrel Cove. It's completely updated - we basically threw away the old Three Barrel and have completely redone it and it looks phenomenal from -

Tolero: It's beautiful.

Eldorudo: Yeah, from everything we've seen so far it just looks phenomenal. Um, everyone did a wonderful job working on it. So, um, it's going be a CR5 area, so I believe, if I'm correct, it'll be CR's two to nine that will get full XP in there. So, anyone above level 9 will be able to go back and experience Three Barrel Cove now, um, and be able to advance through it. So that was one of the things that we really wanted to do, because we want the higher-level players to be able to experience Three Barrel because it looks so wonderful.

Jerry: Cool. So, what can we expect there. Is it 10% more "piratey"?

Eldorudo: I would say it's 110% more "piratey"! (everyone chuckles)

DEVS: Yaar, Yaar, yar.

Jerry: Nice. Oh, that's cool though. I like Three Barrel Cove and I know a lot of other people do. Good to see that. Is it going to be, say, a full-size outdoor area then, huh?

Eldorudo: Yes, definitely full-size.

Glin: It's huge. It's a whole island now.

Eldorudo: It's really big.

Jerry: Cool.

Glin: You know, and there's actually, uh, there's a little, uh, public zone in there as well that has been added. You're not just going to a tavern and then out onto the beach anymore. The tavern is still there, but there'll be another access point and a public space for banking and new quests and so on.

Jerry: Ah, excellent, excellent.

All right, uh, Jeff asks "What and when will we see a fix for the horns? The splintered horns that were added to the loot table but not taken out of the game." Basically, this guy writes that, "you guys have confessed that it was a mistake and should have been taken out, but they are still dropping." So this guy asks, "Will we get a chance to trade them in for other ingredients or basically get some kind of use out of them?"

Eladrin: There are uses planned for the horns in Module 7. I believe that many of them will be extremely sought after. So, don't throw them out!

Jerry: Ah, okay. Huh. Last week's show I had a commercial for "Splintered Horn Crunch Cereal." I thought that was a pretty good use for them.

Eladrin: So tasty.

Glin: You might have to take up a trade crafting for Mod 8, Jerry.

Jerry: Yeah. (chuckles) Interesting. So not in a position to get into details about what they will be used for at this point?

Eladrin: I think that's a secret at this time.

Jerry: Okay. Well, anyway, something to look forward to and, uh, yeah, I guess we should hang on to them.

All right, Klazz asks, "Is there more that you guys can do to make Stormreach seem more alive and a little bit less static?" He writes, "I think one of the things that made the anniversary event so popular was it made Stormreach come alive."

I guess I don't 100% agree with his statement that it doesn't seem alive right now, but are you guys have some plans to maybe even, uh, maybe boost it up even more here?

Glin: We're doing some changes to the AI over the next couple of modules. Probably Mod 8 is where we'd have something sort of significant behind the scenes. I don't know if that's something that Codog can speak to a little bit more.

Codog: Yeah, sure. As we saw during the event (Jerry: he's referencing the market place event) we had some pretty major lag and some of those performance issues related to AI's in public spaces. Um, so we're taking a really good look at doing some reworking of the AI to accomodate things like that so that we won't see those problems in the future.

Jerry: Oh, that's excellent. Good news, good news there!

Codog: At this moment it's a technical limitation that we're going to be overcoming in the near future. Probably not Module 7, but on beyond that.

Jerry: All right.

Eldorudo: Also to add onto that Jerry: Just additionally, we are using some more of the world event tech. It's not going to be used in the same way that we did the tent event, but we are using it in Module 7. I'm not going to give too much info, but players will be able to, uh, to influence, uh, the way things happen, um, for unlocking some content.

Jerry: Hmm, well you've definitely piqued my interest there. That's interesting. Cool, cool.

All right, uh, Greg asks, "I'd like to know if there's anything in the works for giving the raid loot from the dragon a makeover?" This guys says there's just a couple of pieces of raid loot from the dragon that are unique enough that people want to have them, specifically, say, the boots and the Delving Suit. So, I don't know, more dragon loot?

Tharagrim: At this time there's no particular plans to change existing drops, but as different features are added and things of that sort we're hoping to add a few different new items to some of the treasure tables.

Jerry: Cool, cool. Oakheart asks, "As the monks are closing on release, are the druids now in development and are you going to add animal companions with them?" So I guess, I guess this guy's asking just in general terms where do we sit on the druid? Have you guys actually started, you know, some of the graphics and coding on this thing?

Glin: I think I have to take a break and give, uh, resuscitation to Codog. He's probably having a heart attack right about now...

Jerry: (laughs)

Codog: Ugh, Ugh, Ugh.

Glin: He's been crankin' on the monk and we're still in that polish phase right now. Uh, the next class that we do would be the druids, but, uh, um, we have to pace those things out. As the Senior Game Systems Engineer, Codog's instrumental in all of our class development, at least for leading it if nothing else.

Jerry: Sure.

Glin: We're definitely making the plans for the druid. We have tech requests in for some, uh, new tech, graphics as well as engine, and, uh, we'll be rolling that out with the druid and it'll be a few modules after the monk.

Jerry: All right.

Eladrin: And you may be seeing little tidbits here and there beforehand, such as scrolls of druidic spells and that sort of thing because we've been adding some of those as time has been going on.

Jerry: Sounds good. Here's my suggestion, Codog, when you get started on working on the druid there: Go out into the woods, with a laptop and a battery, you know maybe get some birdseed and sprinkle it around yourself. Sit down by a tree. See if you can't bring some of those animals to you and kind of commune with nature as you put 'em together.

Eladrin: And then eat them.

(Mass laughter)

Tolero: Hey, you should have seen all the people he was beating up for the monk.

Jerry: Oh, no!

Codog: Oh yeah.

Eladrin: He totally gets in character.

Codog: One other comment I'd like to make on the druid is that one of the things kind of holding us back on the druid is we want the, uh, the animal companions and pets of this class to be, uh, be solid and unique, as the game right now needs some improvement around pet tech. That's one of those areas that we really want to polish and make really strong for that class.

Jerry: Hmm, yeah, sure. Absolutely. All right, thanks for adding that.

All right, Midvan asks, "I understand that Dungeons and Dragons version four (Jerry: I think this guy's obviously talking about Fourth Edition pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons) is being introduced in June. I read on Wikipedia that there's a plan to have an online version of it as well as the pen and paper version. I want to know if the online version of Four will replace the online Stormreach version 3.5, or will Stormreach (which is based on 3.5) still be there to be played?"
I, uh, I think this guy's a little confused in terms of what product's what, but I guess this is probably something that's being asked by a bunch of people so why don't we tackle this one. How is DDO 3.5 different from what's being planned by Wizards of the Coast for Fourth Edition here?

Glin: I think the differences are actually difficult to call out since they're still in their Beta.

Jerry: But they're separate, I mean they're separate programs. DDO is not the same as this, what, "Dungeons and Dragons Insider", right?

Glin: Oh, you mean as far as the online, yeah. I can definitely speak to that. WOTC, Wizards of the
Coast, uh, as I understand it they're doing their own, um, online communications type of format, not an actual game like D&D. So what they would do digitally would be very different than, than what we're putting out D&D. I can't speak about what they're actually going to do, but from what I've read online myself so far their online play isn't going to be a full action graphical interface role playing game, it's going to be an online version for the pen and paper players to play together online.

Jerry: Yeah, it's not an MMO per se as it is more of kind of like, uh, a way to do the pen and paper online and from what I understand kind of supplement even your tabletop game a little bit too, so I think the two are going to be quite different, right?

Glin: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And it's something that we aren't developing with them. Um, our development path and what we do with the 4.0 rule set or not is something we'd be negotiating with them in the future.

Jerry: Uh, final question here is from Standpoint, my brother. He says, "Are there any plans to turn Irestone Inlet into a raid?"

Eldorudo: That would be awesome.

Glin: Wait a minute. You can complete it and it's not a raid? I think I've had a party wipe every time I've gone in there. That's at least six of them.

Jerry: I think basically what he's getting at is he'd like to see a low-level raid and certainly Irestone might lend itself to that kind of thing being as its sort of a large area and a really big battle.

Glin: Yeah, we don't have any plans for low-level raids. It's something you do generally when you've built up your character more. Irestone, definitely, is a challenge in its own
as a six person. But, uh, one of the things it's missing is a raid boss. I think it would be an expensive feat to turn that into a raid cuz we'd have to make that ship actually blow up at the end.

Jerry: Sure. Yeah.

Eldorudo: Yar-Yar's revenue.

Jerry: No, the ship itself could come alive - that could be the raid boss!

Glin: (deadpan) Yeah, that could be. (chuckles) It's like the Middle Ages Transformers.

Jerry: Yeah, a precursor to the Titan, you know.

Glin: The warforged boat.

Jerry: Yeah, exactly.

Tolero: (Jerry: sorry, couldn't figure out what she said)

Jerry: All right guys, well I really appreciate you taking some time with me this week and look forward - um, we didn't get to all of our questions here this week so the few we have left over here, um, we're going to talk about next time around as well. And of course there's still plenty of room for your questions as well.

If you want to submit a question for Ask the Devs, it's pretty easy to do: All you have to do is send an email to ddocast@gmail.com. That's ddocast@gmail.com. It's great if you tag it with "Ask the Devs" or give me a name that I can use when I'm reading this on the air, not required but it just kinda helps me keep it organized. I can ususally sort thorugh if you don't add that tag on there, but, uh, yeah - we're still looking for your questions and we'll be doing this "Ask the Devs" here on a regular basis in the future.

All right, it was great to have you guys on the show with me this week. Let me go down the list here: Quarion, nice work as always, I really appreciate your help here.

Quarion: No problem. Thanks for your help. We really appreciate being able to communicate to the players directly.

Jerry: And Tolero - what'cha got going on in the near future, anything interesting that you want to pass along about your life?

Tolero: Oh, just the usual. It's always grabbing feedback. I really appreciate all the players that have been participating in the weekly feedback thread. Usually comes out on Mondays, so if you haven't gotten the chance to check that out go ahead and stop by. I read them all and it's always fun to see what responses people have for them.

Jerry: All right, absolutely. All right, Codog, great to have you on the show here and look forward to having you on again in the future.

Codog: Ah, fantastic. It's been wonderful being here. I'm a big fan. I listen to you often, in the wee hours of the morning listen to Carl Douglas and my DDOcast.

Jerry: Ah, nice, nice. All right Eladrin, good work as always. Great to have you on the show and, uh, good luck with everything you got going with here in Mod 7, and Mod 8 and everything else going on in DDO in the future.

Eladrin: Thanks a lot and I'm looking forward to it, to seeing you next time.

Jerry: Sure. All right, Glin, great to have you on the show too.

Glin: Good, thanks. Glad to be back.

Jerry: All right, Eldorudo. Let's see: I think word's officially spread that you are the voice of the Pit Fiend. Do you care to own up to that one?

Eldorudo: Uh, I guess I will. I'll own up. I did my best death metal voice on that one with a lot of help from the sound engineer to make it sound demonic and evil. So, yeah, that's me and, uh, to everyone out there I want them to brush up on their pirate-speak and go watch a lot of pirate movies and get ready for Mod 7.

Jerry: Nice. What's your favorite pirate movie?

Eldorudo: Uh, even though it's not necessarily a pirate movie I would have to say Goonies.

Jerry: Well, it's pirate-like. It's got its piratey elements to it.

Eldorudo: Yes, and there's some Goonies references actually that you - might - come upon in Mod 7.

Jerry: Oh, cool. All right, and, uh, finally Tharagrim - it was great to have you on the show for the first time and look forward to hopefully hearing from you in the future.

Tharagrim: Thank you very much for having me, it's, uh, been a pleasure.

END

www.ddocast.com

Here's a link to the transcript in .pdf format: http://ddocast.com/files/82681-72328/Ask_t..._Transcript.pdf
I now work for Turbine!
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Jerry
Member Avatar
The Host Of DDOcast.
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
ASK THE DEVS 4

RECORDED FOR DDOcast, EPISODE 72

AIR DATE: Sunday, July 15th, 2008

www.ddocast.com
Host: Jerry Snook

Jerry: All right, got our fourth segment of "Ask the Devs" here ready to go and we've got quite a few folks from Turbine with us this week. I really want to thank everyone for being on the show. Let's go on down the list - first off is Merlask...no, wait a second - Tolero!

Tolero: Now, now, you all should know by now that's Tolero.

Jerry: I know, I just say that on purpose here. We miss ya! How ya doing there?

Tolero: Not bad, how are you doing Jerry?

Jerry: Doing really good. Also with us is lead designer Eladrin. Welcome back to "Ask the Devs" here Eladrin.

Eladrin: Thanks!

Jerry: Also with us is Theragrim - return visit to DDOcast.

Theragrim: Thanks for having me, Jerry.

Jerry: With us here is Django - how ya doing?

Django: Good, good to be here.

Jerry: And a first time on DDOcast, I really do appreciate it. Also with us is Torc, how ya doing, Torc?

Torc: I'm doing well, thank you very much.

Jerry: Great to have you on the show. And finally here, the third new person to "Ask the Devs" this week is Flimsy Firewood. How you doing?

Flimsy: Doing all right, thanks. How about you?

Jerry: Doing real good, really appreciate you taking a few minutes for us. Couple more folks to mention here. Returning back to "Ask the Devs" is Glin, how ya doing Glin?

Glin: Doing good, staying cool...In fact I'm going to try to speak like Eldorudo here for the whole podcast, just to stay cool...

Jerry: Nice. And, uh, yeah - speaking of cool voices here - Eldorudo. How you doing Eldorudo?

Eldorudo: And I'm going to try to do my best Glin impersonation, which I probably won't do very good....(laughter)

Jerry: Nice.

Glin: So you're going to be real sarcastic, huh?

Jerry: Thanks everyone for being on the show. We really do appreciate it. Let's get right to the questions here.
Our first question comes from Hakuna Mutata who says, "Would it be possible to add a low level raid, so twelve people can have fun questing together at once?" This guy is suggesting levels 4 to 6, potentially something based on Searing Heights, now that the Twelve has been opened.
I know we've talked about this a little bit in the past, but what do you think? Any considerations? Any change of thoughts on that one?

Torc: I guess I'll field this. Because of the recent creation of a quest called "Devil Assault", something like this might be possible down the road. What "Devil Assault" did is it allowed us to make a relatively level-neutral quest that could expand throughout the level ranges, and, uh, we might be interested in trying to do something like that again except with a raid. This would make something available potentially to that level range.

Jerry: Ah, that would be excellent! I know, myself, I think a lot of people would really like that, that would be pretty interesting. I like that whole "Devil Assault" thing, it was pretty cool, so...
All right, the next question here comes from Suemo, who says, "There have recently been some features added to Lord of the Rings Online like clothing, character customization, player housing, etcetera, that have been requested by the DDO community. In general (he asks), how easy is it to port things over from Lord of the Rings Online than, say, creating it from scratch?"
Is the technology somewhat similar, is it a lot more difficult to do. I mean, how difficult is it to bring some of that LOTRO stuff over to DDO?

Glin: Basically, uh, porting over LOTRO tech suffers by evolution by convergence. So, they may have something in there that, uh, is based on the Turbine proprietary code. They've been integrated into their system, which has started with the same roots. Like our mail system, for example, between the games is similar. But, for the most part we can't just "port" something over like a copy-paste. But there's been a lot of things that we have traded back and forth that were not too heavy, like the live event system for example is one that was originally created for the LOTRO game. And then there's things that are Turbine engine, so it's the larger engineering tasks that aren't specific to the game content, like DX10 support, which DDO is going to have a Beta in an upcoming release.

Jerry: Cool, cool. You know we did have an email here also to "Ask the Devs" where someone suggested about the possibility of maybe bringing in the grass and tree leaf tech from Lord of the Rings Online. I know that they in particularly like the kind of the way the grass sways in that particular game, and that sort of thing.

Glin: Yeah, actually, Necropolis-Orchard of the Macabre already has some of that in there. Um, so that's something the moving trees, the moving grass, that's something that's been in recent modules. You will definitely be seeing more of that as we take advantage of the DX10 support, probably this fall.

Jerry: Sure. All right, next question. Mapa asks, "Why is the preferred weapon of a Paladin of the Undying Court a scimitar, but all racial weapon enhancements are for long sword, rapier and short sword? Are more enhancements coming to make my elven pally want to pick up a scimitar?"
(chuckles)

I don't actually know this one myself. This one is a little over my head, I think. Preferred weapon of the Paladin of the Undying Court a scimitar? Racial weapon enhancements, long sword, rapier, short sword. I guess he's wondering if any, uh, we might be seeing some enhancements for Paladins or elves that would encourage them to pick up a scimitar?

Eladrin: At the moment I don't have any plans on doing that, but it's possible if there's a desire for it. The Paladin of the Undying Court receives the scimitar as it's favored weapon because that's the favored weapon of the Undying Court. Similarly, the poor drow should be very happy that they didn't receive a kama, the favored weapon of the Vulkoor.

Jerry: Yeah. All right, Talyn asks, uh, "Can we have the ability to
cancel buffs?"

Eladrin: Maybe!

Glin: The work involved in something like that...I realize where that would be appreciated in the live events, in the particular example that that player asked about. But, uh, it would be a lot of work for a rare occasion, where it wouldn't have a lot of benefits in a party to "shake a buff". Uh, if we some, uh, more timing-based things like an obstacle course where you had to go slow and you were hasted and had to wait for that to
wear off. I mean that would be that kind of rare occasion. I don't know where too much strength is a bad thing in any place in the game, for example...

Jerry: Yeah.

Glin: I just think it would be a low return on investment.

Jerry: Sure.

Glin: To add that sort of ability, given the chance for it to have ill effect in the gameplay itself.

Jerry: Sure. Let me just mention since I forgot to actually include that part of the question - he specifically did mention in his question here about the anniversary event where people were trying to casting haste on others trying to climb up that tower there.
All right, next question comes from Lowell who says, "When can we see some different weapons? Things like pole arms, elven thin blade..."

Theragrim: It really depends on the specific weapons. Something like the elven thin blade it's possible that we might be able to do something like that. It would probably be something kind of akin to one of the, say, shining crescents. Sort of a one-off or something like that, or possibly a piece of specific named loot. But the possibilities of pole arms are less likely just because of the animation time and things of that sort.

Jerry: All right, not sure who might be able to field this next one. This one comes from Ustice. You might have some idea what he's asking about if you've read his posts on the ddo.com forums and that is: "Why is it taking so long to replace the favicon on the forums?" This guy wants a favicon!

Tolero: That's all me. It's one of those things where a lot of people I've gotten pokes from people saying "just load the favicon up!" and it's really not that simple. There's a lot of processes on the side of things, and everything has to be scheduled and a lot of times higher priority things get pushed in front of little things like that. But that doesn't mean I've forgotten about it! Uh, I have it and a few more forum avatars coming, so just keep your eyes peeled and one day you'll look up and there will be your favicon.

Jerry: All right, next question did not have a name attached to it, but this person asks, "Are there any thoughts on going back to spreading out the content a bit more?" You know, a while back you guys moved from having, say, point-one updates to solid number updates, you know, basically consolidating these smaller updates into larger updates like what we saw with Mod 7 here.
Any thought, this guy's asking, about maybe going back to the old way of doing thing?

Torc: Well, if I'm reading the question right he's actually talking about
rolling out kind of what we're already making gradually. Um, I mean
taking an existing module and like we don't release the raid, we don't release The Shroud in the Vale of Twilight until like a month after we've released the first part, if I'm reading this question correctly.

Jerry: Yeah, that's right. This person did suggest, uh, "as opposed to, say, having 12-15 quests with a wilderness area and a raid on a Mod, why not do a wilderness area with five quests one month, open the other ten quests the next month and then add the raid the following month?" I guess sort of spreading out that sort of idea maybe rather than one big lump, kind of doing that more frequently.

Torc: It's an interesting idea, though, like my, you know, just total "gut reaction" to it is that most of the players who are biting at the bit to play this content, they will immediately race through the dungeons and hit that line and be waiting to play the raid immediately within that first week. I just, just imagine what Mod 6 would have been like if we did that, I think a lot of people would have been waiting. Um, uh, I'm not sure...yeah.

Eldorudo: Just to add to that Jerry we sort of did that in Module 7 when we sort of had the big race to unlock the Subterrane. I know it wasn't spread out over weeks and months but at least we had an opportunity for players to unlock content at their own rate, so. I think that went pretty successfully, so we'll kind of evaluate and go from there and maybe we'll do some more stuff along those lines.

Jerry: Sure.

Eladrin: And it gave Thelanis a chance to show their dominance.

Eldorudo: Ghallanda was pretty close.

Jerry: I thought us Sarlonians were going to win it, but, uh, what can I say...

Tolero: I thought it was really close.

Jerry: Yeah, absolutely, that was pretty cool, that's for sure.
Uh, just a couple more things to bring up. Tolwyn asks "How about a true castle quest? We have had to defend an outpost a few times (like Kobold Assault), but how about a quest where toons have to sneak into a castle and could be outside on the walls and then get inside to take something or stop a kind, etc? Perhaps even a quest where monsters are trying to protect an item, caravan, NPC, like we have had to do before?

Glin: I can hear the DM text now, "Have fun storming the castle!"

(laughter)

Eladrin: Sounds a bit like Splinterskull to me.

Jerry: That's right, that's right, you know, I guess Splinterskull would probably apply there too.

Eldorudo: A lot of the actual things you just asked in that question we have in the game, actually. It's just, we don't have a, you know, "a castle quest", but, um, we actually, in Module 9 we are going to be going to Shavarath. I know this doesn't necessarily answer the question, but it'll be a little nugget of info here, so, and that should have some pretty epic encounters in it. We have some cool things that we're already planning, um, so that should be a properly epic for everyone.

Jerry: Now, I know that this isn't obviously a castle, but a bit like Meridia in the Vale of Twilight could maybe be the setting of some kind of attack as well. That's a bit castle-like. I don't know, ya know, just a thought I guess.

All right, let's just kind of go around the room here. Wanted to ask a bit of a casual question as we're wrapping up this week's "Ask the Devs". Wanted to ask you guys what in particular - you - liked best about Mod 7. Mod 7 of course recently released here and, uh, I'm sure having a good time with it, I figured you guys are too. So, let me just kind of ask ya: What is your favorite bit about Mod 7?

Eladrin: Abundant step.

Jerry: Yeah? (chuckles) That's a good one. I think a lot of people are going to agree with you on that one there.

Eladrin: Except for the people who hate it.

Jerry: Yeah, that's true.

Glin: Who hates abundant step?

Jerry: Yeah, I don't know.

Tolero: Yeah, you can't hate abundant step. If you've seen it in action, it's just way too cool.

Django: Um, yeah, there's a personal part. I don't know if anyone's actually seen it yet. Uh, there's a certain area of Three Barrel Cove that you might find a certain individual stalking you. If anyone does find him, I'd love to see a post.

Jerry: Oh, that's uh, cryptic and interesting.

Flimsy Firewood: I liked a couple things in that module. For one, that was the first Module I was working on with Turbine. But, uh, we had a lot of success I guess with the
Three Barrel Cove area, because it had this "feel good" feeling to it about going back to old content and putting new life into it. That was, uh, something that we accomplished very well. And, Django here, was the person who built the landscape from scratch.

Jerry: Yeah!

Flimsy Firewood: The other thing that I was kind of watching carefully, on the live servers was the secret vault in the Subterrane area. Only a very few people actually got into that, and there is a sort of a mystery about how to get to it, because it's not...well, I actually can't say too much about how to get there because that would be telling.

Jerry: Sure, want to keep the secret there.

Flimsy Firewood: Yeah, yeah.

Jerry: Sure.

Eldorudo: And, Jerry, I think my favorite thing is the "spamming buddy list bug".

Jerry: (laughs)

Eldorudo: Actually, no. I'm just kidding. I would have to say the revamp of Three Barrel Cove. I think it's just beautiful. Keeper and Django did a wonderful job on the landscape, and I also had a lot of fun doing the three new quests that we worked on. I think my favorite part is Penzance, I had a lot of fun doing the "piratey speak" for him. So, that's probably my personal favorite. But I think overall it was a really fun area to work on.

Jerry: Yeah, my personal favorite is probably Three Barrel Cove as well. I mean I like the monks, and I like the other stuff too, but there was just something about Three Barrel that really just appeals to me.

Theragrim: I was actually really happy about the ability to start making item sets and things of that sort. It's just some new item tech that we just got and I'm looking forward to using it in the future a little more.

Eladrin: I like itty-bitty beholders.

Jerry: Yeah, the mini-beholders, huh?

Eladrin: and dogs that bark bees. Oh, they don't know about that yet.
(laughs)

Tolero: Oh noes!

Jerry: Are you serious?

Tolero: Maybe.

Eladrin: Maybe!

Jerry: You know someone did bring up, not sure if you saw on the forums, about the, the, uh, mindflayers, when they suck up the warforged. There's a video on YouTube about that one there. I don't know if you guys are aware of that.

Eladrin: Oh, yeah, we did that back in Module 2, that's old hat.

Jerry: Oh is it? Well, I hadn't seen it before.

Tolero: Think my favorite thing and it's kind of oddball thing compared to the bigger, grander things that are really awesome, but my favorite thing is the custom chat channels. Um, back when I was doing player things I would have loved to have had a channel where I could make an event channel, keep from spamming the general channel, get all my buddies together, make alliances. And the users have really latched onto it. I noticed that, uh, a lot of the Ghallanda folks made a raid channel and went in and were organizing together in their custom chat channel to help get everybody motivated to unlock the race.

Jerry: Ah, yeah. That's interesting. I myself I really haven't had a chance to check out the custom chat channels too much, but it is certainly a cool idea. Thanks for bringing that, too.
Glin: My favorite thing is definitely monks in general. A couple of the more subtle things, though, is I love the slow fall animation, that, uh, pulled right out of the cinema and onto our screen. And then, um, I'm trying really hard (and Eladrin didn't make it easy), to get a monk that can do whirlwind attack.

Tolero: It looks awesome.

Glin: Really cool, and I really want a build on live that can do that.

Eladrin: Yeah, I totally didn't make that easy on you, do I?

Glin: It's like, "Intelligence is a dump stat?"

Jerry: Uh oh.

Tolero: Yeah, I have a monk that can do that and if you can get a monk that can do it it looks really neat.

Jerry: Huh.

Eladrin: Oh, and did I forget about my other favorite thing about the mod? Did I mention Thelanis' dominance of the race?

Glin: Oh, you mean the live event.

Jerry: Yeah, but it's all because of the Xoriat folks on there, right?

Eldorudo: (jokingly), Oh, you mean that Thelanis cheated and
Ghallanda was screwed?

Glin: Wait, you're not bringing up the fact that I tried to help
Argonnessen on Thursday, are you?

Eldorudo: I wasn't going to, since you do bring it up...

Theragrim: By "tried to help", do you mean failed the dragon raid?

Jerry: Yeah! (laughs)

Glin: As in trying to qualify my alts on Argo, instead, yeah.

Tolero: Traitor!

Glin: Oh, c'mon.

Eladrin: Don't let the devs in your party.

Glin: That's true.

Eladrin: It'll only end in tears.

Jerry: This question's out of the blue, so I don't know if you guys want to address it, but do you think we might see something more in that respect in the future here? Could we see potentially another kind of race or live event tech involving some kind of inter-server competition?
Eladrin: It was a lot of fun this time, so I wouldn't be surprised to see something like it in the future.

Jerry: Sure.

Eladrin: It may be a little bit longer, cuz this one only lasted a few days. Maybe a week or so.

Jerry: Did you expect it to last that long, or did people surprise you?

Glin: We expected another week, overall. I think we didn't take into account all of the alts that were ready, and overall I know a lot of people (like I was able to get a level 8 Bard to go along on a couple of parties just to catch tokens), because people don't really need twelve people to run those raids, so you can bring on some low levels. Didn't really account for all of those things as well. So they definitely cleared through those quests very quickly.

Jerry: Yeah.

Glin: Which was great. I mean I'm much happier that they got in there fast, as opposed to dragging it on a week, and everybody was in by the weekend, which was great.

Tolero: Even watching it before we got the first graph out, I was surprised at just how much movement there was. Even before I got the graph out, Khyber was in the lead, and then all of a sudden Ghallanda came rolling up, and then all of a sudden Thelanis came up, and there was a lot of movement up and down and that made it a lot more fun and exciting to watch. If it would have been one set pace and no movement at all, then that would be a little bit boring.

Jerry: Yeah, maybe you guys should have had the turn-in for that Abbot token?

Eladrin: Yeah, we should have actually, considering how many times the Abbot's been beaten this week.

Jerry: Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard that. I mean, you guys are obviously more on top of that than I am, but is that the case? I mean, have we seen the Abbot get beaten this week?

Eladrin: Oh yeah, and people found some of the new raid loot in there.

Jerry: Cool.

Tolero: Ironically, Argo was all over that.

Jerry: Huh, wow. Well, I guess I'm going to have to head back in there and, well, probably get stomped. But maybe not!

Eladrin: Bring your monk.

Jerry: Yeah! Well, actually, my monk's only level 2.

Glin: There's definitely a difficulty difference in the Abbot, and we didn't set up the tech to have a variance in how many coins or tokens need to be collected in the raids, so we didn't include it because we didn't want to have to have people have to run it as many times, that would have extended the event longer. However, we probably would have
only gotten another week out of it, in hindsight, because people are able to run it now. And enough level 16's can get in there and run it that it's probably less of an issue.

Jerry: All right, well I think I've taken about as much time of you guys as I can this time around. I really do appreciate you guys taking some time with us for "Ask the Devs" on DDOcast. I know the players like to be able ask you these things, and we of course like to have you on the show as well. So let me go down the list here: uh, thanks very much Eladrin I really do appreciate everything you guys have been doing here.

Eladrin: It's fun, that's why I keep coming.

Jerry: Cool. Also, uh, Theragrim. Welcome back to DDOcast and thanks for being on.

Theragrim: Thanks for having me, it was a lot of fun.

Jerry: All right. And the new guys! Well, not new to Turbine, but new to DDOcast. It's great to have you on Django, Torc, Flimsy Firewood. Cool to be able to connect a voice to the name there.

Django: Thanks Jerry.

Flimsy: Thanks for having us.

Torc: Yeah, thank you.

Jerry: And producer Glin there, thanks for being on the show as always.

Glin: Sure, hope to be back the next time around.

Jerry: Eldorudo. Thanks for being on the show - any plans, have you given any thought to GenCon again this year? I know you went last year.

Tolero: Muahahaha.....quiet!

Jerry: Oh, okay.

Eldorudo: Well, I don't have any firm plans yet, but I do hope to be there. I just haven't made any commitments. But yeah, I do hope to go. I've been there the past two years and I really enjoyed myself there. I assume you're going to be going there, Jerry?

Jerry: Oh, yeah. I've got all my four-day tickets and me and the wife will both be there having a lot of fun I'm sure.

Eldorudo: Excellent, well I do hope to see you there then.

Glin: DDO does plan to be at GenCon and PAX this year.

Jerry: Really? Hmm. Well.

Glin: That's our plans.

Jerry: Cool, cool. And finally here, Tolero, I'm sure you'll probably be at GenCon too, huh?

Tolero: Oh, yeah, just keep your eye on the forums. We'll have more information regarding all the places we'll be visiting coming up. We do still have the forum for our live real-world events, so just keep your eyes peeled and as we draw closer we'll have more information for you.

Jerry: Cool. Well, thanks everyone for being on the show this week.

END

###
I now work for Turbine!
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Jerry
Member Avatar
The Host Of DDOcast.
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
Thanks goes out to Favorless from the Mortal Voyage permadeath guild on Argonnessen for typing this up so quick. All I had to do was get it formatted for the web site and make a few minor tweaks to it. Thanks a ton for your work!

There's a link to the transcript in .pdf format at the bottom of the transcript - feel free to download it, share it, whatever!

Jerry

###

Ask the Devs #5

Recorded for DDOcast, Episode 78
Air Date: July 26th, 2008


Jerry: Hello, and welcome to “Ask the Devs”, Issue 5, Volume 5, Number 5? The 5th One, anyway of “Ask the Devs” on DDOcast and I really do appreciate you guys listening to it this week. Got a bunch of people from the Turbine crew to answer your questions, so lets go down the list and introduce some folks. With me here is producer Glen, how ya doing Glin?

Glin: I’m doing good, thanks for having me back.

Jerry: You’re a nice regular to DDOcast “Ask the Devs” and it’s always great to have you on the show. Also with us is Django. How ya doing Django?

Django: Hey Jerry, it’s good to be back again.

Jerry: Cool, great to have you with us. Also is Tharagrim. How you doing Tharagrim?

Tharagrim: Doing pretty well, hope you’re doing pretty well as well.

Jerry: Yep, doing great. Getting ready to move at the end of the month, so I’m starting to look at all the thousands of books and hundreds of video games and everything else that needs to be boxed yet, but uh...

Tolero: Ugh, boxing books is the worst.

Jerry: Yeah it’s fun, isn’t it. Also with us is Thoon. How ya doing Thoon?

Thoon: I’m doing well.

Jerry: I think this may be your inaugural DDOcast episode, am I correct on that one?

Thoon: Sure is.

Jerry: Well, welcome to DDOcast, we’re really glad to have you here.

Thoon: Thanks, and I’m glad to be here.

Jerry: Also is Eldorudo, how ya doing Eldorudo?

Eldorudo: I’m doing just wonderful Jerry, thanks for having me on again.

Jerry: Cool, great to have you on, as always. Also with us is Codog. How ya doing Codog?

Codog: I’m doing great, it’s great to be here.

Jerry: And, I think that’s the crew with us this week. A couple of regulars, Eladrin I understand is out sick a little bit, so get well Eladrin and I understand Keeper, who’s been on the last couple episodes is, as we well know from the DDO.com boards, a couple of comments made. Getting ready to have a child, so good luck there Keeper. Whenever the time comes around, all of our thoughts are gonna be with ya there.

Tolero: See I’m told that Buzzsaw was wanting to have a "Name Keeper’s Baby" thread, but I have not seen it pop up yet. But Keeper says she can’t make any promises, but if you guys are gonna try to pick a name that she’ll read them over and consider them.

Jerry: Now that is a great idea. Oh actually, that’s a good point. I forgot to introduce you as well Tolero. How ya doing?

Tolero: I’m a-lurking.

Jerry: Alright, let’s get to the questions. We have a good list of questions this week and I want to get as many in as we can so let’s just get right to it. Jason asks, “Has the monk been as well received as expected? What has surprised you guys the most about the way that we, as players, play it?”

Tharagrim: In my opinion the monk overall has been generally well-received. There have been a couple bumps in the road, but for the most part, I find it to be one of the more versatile classes that are out there. Additionally, it’s kinda neat because it requires a pretty high level of player skill to be kind of in the top echelon of how we intend the specific class to be played.

Jerry: Yeah, it really is. It’s kind of funny actually. Alex Haddox does his “Inside the Monastery” bit for DDOCast which specifically looks at the monk, and I’ve been in groups with him. He’s an excellent monk player. Now me, on the other hand, maybe a little bit less so. My guy just tends to kinda run up and die. Or, you know, kill things. But it’s kinda interesting, the class really does cater to people who are really able to dedicate their skill set to maximizing the character. Although, you know, you can also just kinda "run and gun", so to speak, like you can with most of the classes as well if you want to.

Glin: Yeah that’s definitely how I play. I do go back and, I think of all the DDOCast crew spots that you have on there, I go back and listen to that one a couple of times to try to retain as much of the information as I can. That one, and the “Crunchy Bits”, that’s at least a three-play most of the time.

Jerry: Yeah I know, isn’t it great?

Glin: I get a lot from those guys. Of course I do have some of the best insight, sitting across the room from the couple of guys that actually put the stats in. But just as far as character building, I don’t torture the guys with my questions on that. I’ve been having a great time, I have a solo monk build and a group-generic human monk build and that one’s been really fun in groups. But I’ve been playing with a warforged monk and they turned out so much better than I thought. I was really concerned about them being really big and having the same animation set, but I think they’re really actually quite graceful for the lumbering piles that they are.

Jerry: Now I know Codog, obviously, you spent countless hours developing the monk here. When you get to actually see the players kinda playing the class, are there things that we do as players that maybe you were like, “Huh, you know I guess I really didn’t expect that people would be doing that with the monk.”

Codog: I’d have to say my biggest moment of joy with DDO happened when the monk was released, and I logged into the game as a monk and saw in the tavern, the Wavecrest, twenty people in pajamas all dancing. It was fantastic seeing people create themselves and then do their first couple swings.

I’ve been very impressed with the multi-classing, and the discussions about the multi-classing, and splashing a level of monk in here, or splashing a level of barbarian, and all the different fun, unique builds and personality that people are putting into their characters. So I’ve been really surprised with some of the builds that have come up, that I’ve said “Hmm, that’s kinda interesting.” It’s been just a joy reading the feedback, good and bad. It was a labor of love and I’ve been just elated with how well it’s gone.

Jerry: Great, great. All right let’s move on here to the next question.

A player by the name of Scott asks, “For screen shots, is there any chance of scrolling all the way to first person view? Also, when I hide the user interface, the party panel remains.”

So I know you can kinda simulate a first person view by going into sneak mode and then shoving that camera all the way to the front. I do that for screenshots for DDOcast, but has there been any thought about potentially not even having to do that, having maybe some kind of first person view mode?

Glin: Yeah, we have talked about it. It’s not really something that’s in the game plan. We’ve talked about some future revisions or additions to combat. It’s nothing that’s slated but it’s something that we definitely would be interested in doing, and not just for the sake of zooming in, but to actually have that perspective when you’re playing for that first person combat experience.

Jerry: I imagine it would be obviously be a lot more than just saying, “Ok, now you can suddenly move your view all the way,” because you would have to deal with all the combat issues and that of potentially not immediately seeing your character in sort of a third person perspective.

Glin: Yeah, and there’d be a lot of tweaking, the way the camera works, the way it’s attached to your character now.

Jerry: Yeah. What about the party panel that remains when you hide the user interface? Every now and then you guys have made some tweaks about what shows and what doesn’t. Any thought about getting rid of the party panel?

Codog: I would say it’s a known issue and we hope to address it in an upcoming release.

Jerry: Sure, all right.

All right next one is actually a couple-of-parter here by a player by the name of Jack. “Will the other classes like paladins, barbarians, fighters, wizards and sorcerers get 'Ways Of' enhancements, and which is the next class you’re working on?” Ya always gotta add that one there ‘cause that’s probably gotta be the most asked question of you guys is what’s the next class, huh?

Tharagrim: I was talking to Eladrin a little bit earlier, since he can’t be here I’m gonna go ahead and put across his answer. So, pretty much, the answer is yes. Our first work will most likely be with paladins and fighters. Later on, we intend to build our “Way Of” enhancements for wizards and sorcerers. It’s just something which is a little further down the line then say paladins or barbarians or fighters.

Jerry: All right, next class. Trying to think what you guys – that’s the druid, right? Pretty sure that’s what we’ve talked about I think in the past here.

Glin: Yeah, we should just have you answer that question ongoing, ‘cause we’ve definitely been getting that. Yeah, it’s still the plans, druid coming out after – it’d be about a year, but it would be the next thing that we put out. And we do still have plans for doing the half-orcs prior to that as a new playable race.

Jerry: Sure, all right. Actually, part three of Jack’s questions here, “Will The Ruins of Threnal” be added as an explorer area?

Eldorudo: We do have some plans for Threnal, Jerry. I can’t really expand too much on them but we will be giving it some love in the next several months, I believe. The details have yet to be determined, but we’ll find out as we go whether it’s gonna be a revamp like Three Barrel or if it’s going to be something along the lines of Sorrowdusk. We’ll see what’s gonna happen, but we’re definitely gonna give Threnal some love.

Jerry: You’re gonna make Coyle a raid boss, aren’t ya.

Eldorudo: Ya never know, Jerry.

Jerry: All right, the next question did not have a name attached to this, but it was kind of an interesting one. Just real quick, go around the room, no pressure here. We’re not saying you guys have to do this or anything, but this person asks, “What is the number one thing that each of you would personally like to see added to the game?”

Do you have any thoughts about, not saying, no timetables are here, there’s no pressure, it can be anything you want. What would you guys personally like to see added to the game?

Tolero: Sit in chairs! Sorry, that’s been my long standing roleplay fantasy wish, is to sit in chairs.

Jerry: We know that. There’s a good video a while back about that. Anyone else got any kinda personal wish list here, if money and time was no object what maybe you’d like to see added to the game?

Django: As a big druid player, I think it’s pretty obvious druid definitely would be on top of my list, and something else that I absolutely (??happen to work on??) would be unique animations for things such as piercing weapons that vary. I just like a little bit of flash.

Thoon: The number one thing I’d like to see added is each bard having a unique bard song. Do that for me and I’d be a very happy person.

Jerry: Yeah that would be a cool one.

Eldorudo: And Jerry, I think I just want the ability to order out food directly from the game. I think that would be a really good thing to add.

Tolero: Chipole!

Jerry: I read about somebody trying to do that with Pizza Hut once. I don’t know if that ever actually happened or not.

Eldorudo: Yeah I think it did, actually. I do recall that. If we could just get some burritos or something like that, or for Keeper, just order some guacamole if you type in /guac and get some delivered. That would be pretty awesome.

Jerry: Well, I do happen to know that there is a bar and restaurant located in Iowa called The Rusty Nail. Maybe we could do some kind of deal with them.

Eldorudo: There ya go.

Tolero: And you know there’s another one I found that was called Waterworks.

Jerry: Oh that’s right.

Tolero: Don’t know if I’d wanna eat at that one.

Eldorudo: Yeah. I doubt we’ll find a Salty Wench though, I have a feeling.

Jerry: No, I don’t think so.

Glin: I think actually that might be up in Alaska. But hey, if they deliver, that’s all that matters.

Jerry: Well ya know, with the Internet, pretty soon we’ll just be able to ship stuff, right. It’ll be just like a transporter.

Glin: I’d like to see our UI get converted over to a Flash interface, and then have player customization added to it. That’d be a nice feature.

Tharagrim: The two different things that I would have would be what Glin said, UI customization. It’s a fantastic feature set. Also I’m really looking forward to when we can put in a full-featured set of crafting.

Jerry: Oh yeah. Well we know that one’s coming, so that wish will be granted here at some point pretty soon.

I myself, I guess I would just like to see potentially upgrades to the voice chat system, finally beat that hurdle, (this would also help with podcasting), of having separate channels, multi-channel audio for both in game and out of game. Something like a voice chat system where you could have individual sliders for each character’s name. That’s maybe a personal, personal wish list there, although, you know...

Glin: Yeah on the voice chat thing too, being able to have a voice chat group like with select members in the guild, even if they had some sort of user cap. That’d be another addition to that too. It’d be cool.

Codog: Given an unlimited budget, or unlimited time, I would completely flesh out the game from a character development standpoint. I'd very much want more spells and more character abilities and full animation set for any weapon style that happens to be out there in the resource books. Having unlimited animation time, I would do amazing things with this game. So that would be my wish.

Jerry: Well, you guys do a great job as it is already.

All right, lets move on to the next question here. This person by the name of Mechfol asks, “We currently have mechanisms in place to respec both enhancements and feats. We can also rename characters and switch servers. These were all originally designed to be permanent aspects of character creation, but through the benevolence of Devs, and in the interest of player enjoyment, we are allowed to pay Turbine or Fred for the changes.

However, I would like you to consider two additional aspects of character creation and perhaps have Fred expand his services: alignment and skills. Many of us regret our alignment and/or skill choices, or have changed the focus of our characters such as a different enhancement way.”

So I guess in general do we think it possible to have alignment or skill respecs in the future?

Glin: We’ve explored all the obvious challenges on the back end for doing that. Multi-classing adds a whole layer of complexity to a lot of the options that are ideal. That’s not necessarily the final answer, I’m sure that somebody else could speak to that, but I know from our discussions that’s one big hiccup in that just the amount of time it would take to add a real respec feature for a partial reroll.

Jerry: I imagine alignment would be significantly easier than skills.

Glin: Yeah. Just have to find a willing priest to convert you.

Jerry: We could just have a system like “Do you listen to heavy metal music?” All of a sudden you’re no longer lawful good.

Glin: Right. Yeah, answer the questions correctly and we’ll covert you to our newly formed alignment.

Tolero: What is your name?! What is your quest?! What is the air speed velocity of a throwing hammer?!

Jerry: Yes, exactly. All right, next question comes from Stormanne Ragerender, who says “Are there any plans to add additional stealth quests in the game?” He actually didn’t say the additional, but I added that because we have a stealth quest in the game. “I love the idea” this guy writes “of a quest where a party must infiltrate an enemy stronghold undetected, or with as little ruckus as possible (looks glaringly at the lead-footed armor clad fighters and barbarians).”

So we do have the one stealth quest, Stealthy Repossession outside of the Wavecrest Tavern (Jerry says: yeah, I know. Should have said Wayward Lobster). Any thoughts about another stealth quest? Something specifically tied towards stealth?

Eldorudo: Well Jerry, we try to offer a lot of options for our quests. It’s really hard to cater to one specific class because it leaves out all the others, and that’s one thing we don’t like to do. Especially if we’re making a quest, we want to be able, since we hand make our quests, it takes us a lot longer than most other games to make one. So we want it to be playable by all players. So, it's not something that we typically do very often.

We like to try and add options though. For instance, we’ll add a path that a rogue can go down for an optional objective or something along those lines. But as far as creating a whole quest just for rogues, it’s probably not going to happen, but we will continue to add options for the different classes to give them that cool feeling of using their skills that are specific to them.

Jerry: I just know as a player here, not to editorialize too much, but I’ve certainly heard from some people in the groups I’ve been in that some people really don’t like Stealthy Repo specifically because it’s sorta stealth-only. So I guess you kinda need to balance out those who would love to see a stealth quest with those who really rather not see another one specifically. Ya know, I think maybe you’re probably right there about having multiple ways to go through it rather than just having to stealth.

Eldorudo: Yeah, exactly. And if one ends up being the easier method, that’s the one that’s gonna be the most popular ones, so we also have to try to weigh that as well.

Jerry: All right, just a couple more quick ones here before we wrap things up.

Paw asks, “Any chance of getting a reply button for the mail system?” Can we hit reply like we can with Hotmail, Gmail, that kind of thing? Anyone want to "reply" to that one?

Tolero: Sorry, I don’t have the button.

Glin: Yes, I was looking for the reply button. Nice one Jerry, good lead-in.

Ya know, it’s really just a matter of it’s a system that we’re not going back and revamping. If we were doing another round of revisions on mail, that’s likely a UI change we’d make. It’s just low on the priorities. It's something that's possible, I don’t know offhand if there’s any technical reasons that we didn’t add it. I think it was just the initial design was very simplified.

Jerry: All right, final question here comes from Jason who asks, “What was the funniest bug that appeared during development or in the quality assurance process?” Can anyone there think of any bugs that you found particularly amusing before they hit the servers there?

Glin: Well let’s see. I know that there have been a few that have been passed around.

One that I liked came from one of our overseas partners, where they mistakenly uploaded the wrong screenshot. So it said, the bug was just in a kind of broken English, “Game not performing as expected” and then it said “See attachment”. And you opened up the attachment and it was a screenshot for Halo 2.

Jerry: Oh no!

Glin: So we closed that by design.

Jerry: Yeah, I can imagine.

Codog: I would have to say during the development when we were writing combat for players, I got the initial combat swing to work in our rewrite for PvP, and the first thing that happened, I swung my sword and I died. And I come to find out through debugging that I had killed myself with the sword because I was targeting myself. So, suicide was one of my favorite bugs.

Also monsters, this is a great bug. So, when we first implemented the hate system for monsters, I ran up to a monster and I hit him, and he just stood there, and just stood there, and stood there. Looking at the debuggings view, as we were trying to figure out “Why isn’t he reacting?” he was in a moment of self-loathing. He hated himself because he detected himself upon logging into the game.

Jerry: Wow, you guys were very Emo there, for a while. Killing yourself, monsters loathing themselves...

Glin: And now you know the birth of /death.

Eldorudo: I’d probably say that one of the funnier ones that made it live, Jerry, was probably the infinitely splitting slimes.

Tolero: Oh yeah, that one’s classic.

Jerry: Yep that was a classic. Now that was one of the few that made it to live.

Tolero: I think my favorite one was around the anniversary. We were trying to check all the different things related to the anniversary cakes, and one of the things was originally the Djinnis were actually treated as an object, so if you would try to walk through one you couldn’t. So you could actually make multiple Djinnis, and we had a whole bunch of us together and you could just stand on top of the Djinnis and surf on them because they were solid, but they were rounded on top. So it would throw you all around. It was kinda like a little slip and slide.

Jerry: Nice, or maybe like a Pearl Jam concert from the early 90’s.

Tolero: Yeah, ya know, body surfing, Djinni surfing.

Jerry: Those are some good ones there.

Tharagrim: One of my favorite ones is when I was working on a new spell for the next mod which is Death Pact, which brings you back to life after you die.

When I first started implementing it, it would automatically stay on the character. So as soon as you would die, you would pop back alive. I was surrounded by particular monsters that I was testing on, so for like fifteen minutes I was stuck in a loop of monsters just killing me, hopping back to life, and then bouncing back and forth. It was kinda funny to watch.

Jerry: Nice.

Eldorudo: I actually thought of another one. When we were doing the big market tent event for the second anniversary, we actually had loaded it up on a test server and it didn’t quite go as planned. Right away, as soon as we loaded it up, the tent just started exploding! We were actually hoping to kinda let it play out over a few days, but right away it just started exploding. Obviously we kinda blew the surprise on the test servers, so that was kinda troubling for us. But you know, of course we recovered and all went mostly as planned.

Jerry: Oh yeah. That still has to go down as one of the coolest things. People were there, those of us who were there can remember that one fondly, that’s for sure.

Glin: Yep, live to tell about it.

Jerry: All right, well I think I’ve taken about as much time of your guy’s as I can this time around. I really do appreciate you guys checking in with DDOcast and the people here who like to ask questions of ya and get some answers. Let me just say goodbye in group here to Glin, Django, and Tharagrim, thanks very much for being on the show.

Glin: Thanks again.

Jerry: Also Thoon, Eldorudo, and Tolero. Thanks for being on.

Thoon: Thanks, great to be here.

Eldorudo: Thanks for having us Jerry.

Jerry: And Codog, thanks for being on as well.

Codog: Jerry, you’re my hero.

###
Ask the Devs 5 PDF
I now work for Turbine!
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Jerry
Member Avatar
The Host Of DDOcast.
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
Thanks as always to LA Mike (FavorFlave) for his transcripting work!

DDOcast’s Ask the Devs, from Episode 91
Air Date: 10/25/08

Jerry: All right, welcome to the sixth edition of "Ask the Devs" here on DDOCast. We have a nice full group of people from Turbine here to answer your questions, so let me get started with some introductions. First up with us is Eladrin. How ya doing Eladrin?

Eladrin: Good.

Jerry: Good, good. Keeping busy, I'm sure, getting ready for Mod 8 and what, maybe doing some work on Mod 9 and drinking a lot. Nice. Also with us is FlimsyFirewood. How ya doing Flimsy?

FlimsyFirewood: So far, so good.

Jerry: Good, good. Keeping ya buys there at DDO?

FlimsyFirewood: Ah, yeah. Really.

Jerry: Nice.

Tolero: You guys all sound so energetic.

Jerry: You guys are worn out, huh.

Tolero: Like "Oh my god, we're so beat! All these Modules (inaudible).

Jerry: Well we've been meaning to tape this "Ask the Devs" for a couple of weeks now. You've been so apologetic, Tolero, and we really appreciate that. It's kind of funny because I keep getting these e-mails saying, "You know, we wanted to tape it at this date, but the devs are just busy doing Mod 8 (or doing this, that or the other thing)." So I know that you guys have been working really hard, and we really do appreciate that. Also with us is Eldorudo. How ya doing Eldorudo?

Eldorudo: Unlike the other guys, Jerry, I am fantastic!

Jerry: Good, good! Also with us is Tharagrim. How ya doing, Tharagrim?

Tharagrim: Doing pretty good. How ya doing Jerry?

Jerry: Doing excellent, myself. It's starting to turn a little bit winter-like up here in Minnesota. Last couple of days we've seen the temperature drop, but it's kind of a nice time to be here too. All right, also with us is Django. How ya doing Django?

Django: Hi Jerry, nice to be here again. Like Eldorudo, I'd say I'm doing fantastic but I don't wanna take his schtick.

Jerry: Nice. Also we have a new voice to "Ask the Devs" here. A developer that I've not met yet goes by the name of Nanook. How ya doing Nanook?

Nanook: Hey Jerry, doing great. And yourself?

Jerry: Doing great. And I found out before we started taping here we have a bit in common with our like of Frank Zappa's music, hence the name.

Nanook: I love Frank Zappa, yeah man, he's been an inspiration to me for a long time.

Jerry: All right, now we've got the voices attached to the names, let's go down the list of questions. We have a good list of questions for "Ask the Devs" this week. I wanted to try and get through as many of these as we can. Hopefully we can also talk a little bit about Mod 8, which is somewhat up on Risia right now as well. So we'll see how much we can cram into the show here.

All right, first question comes from Steiner-Davion who says, "The traditional starter quests have a small amount of favor associated with them. Will the quests in the New Player Experience (NPE) have favor associated with them as well? If so, what faction/factions (I think he means favor) and how will this favor difference be handled with currently existing characters?"

So basically what he's asking is, we have our old favor from the harbor quests; many of those harbor quests are getting redone into quests for Korthos Village. How is the whole favor thing gonna work? Are we gonna see a net gain or loss in favor? I also understand that the Korthos stuff is a somewhat different House that you earn favor for, so how is this all gonna work?

Eladrin: It's a secret. No, actually, they're all on Free Agent rep I think.

Eldorudo: Free Agent, yeah.

Eladrin: Whereas before they were Coin Lords. So now you know the answer and you can talk.

Eldorudo: Well I knew the answer, but I don't know how it's different . . .

Tolero: Any of the ones that had originally Coin Lord favor - why can't I say that? Coin. Lord. Favor. - yeah, Coin Lord favor, retain that same favor type but the newer quests that have been added are on Free Agents.

Jerry: Ok, so the stuff that's been revamped is still going to be on Coin Lord favor? Say, the tavern brawl that's on Korthos Village that’s going to be still Coin Lord favor rather than Free Agent Favor?

Tolero: I don't have the list in front of me right now. I know in some cases the Wavecrest quest evolved a lot. We've done a lot with that since its inception, so in some cases if there are parts that got added to it, it may also be on Free Agents rather than the Coin Lord. Anything where you get that nice deja vu sense, those are still gonna be on your Coin Lord favor.

Jerry: Ok, I think the reason he asks is because he's wondering if someone were to rerun the revamped quests, so to speak, you know, the new quests that are sort of built on the old quests, would they see a change in the allocation of their favor, do you know?

Tolero: No, you're not gonna be going in and running those old quests to try and stack favor on top of what you already had before. I hope that clears it up. It's a little confusing for people when we change everything around about the way they're used to stuff.

Jerry: Sure. Do you know will that switch if I were I to rerun it from Coin Lord favor to Free Agent favor if that change was made in the quest.

Tolero: There shouldn't be any that converted Houses. If they were already there, they should have stayed with what they had originally, and if they were a new edition then they would be under Free Agent.

Jerry: Alright, well that sounds good. Let's bring in the next question here. This one comes from Oleg, saying, "When will we get personal housing like in Lord of the Rings Online (LoTRO)?" Are you guys in any position to talk about this one yet?

Eladrin: Nope.

Jerry: Nope. One of those 'stay tuned' things, huh.

Nanook(?): Yeah it's one of those 'stay tuned' type things.

Jerry: Sure, sure.

Eladrin: It is safe to say that if we do have it, then it won't be exactly like in LoTRO. It'll be better customized to suit our needs.

Tolero: It'll fit with the D&D theme.

Jerry: All right, let's move on to question number 3. This one comes from ArkoHighStar: "Any thought about adding a quest mode for adventure zones to broaden their appeal and usefulness? Basically," he says, "being able to enter the area as a quest with objectives and xp upon completion. Say, for example, Irestone Inlet. It's an open area quest with multiple objectives. Could they take an outdoor area like Searing Heights and add a new mode where the area becomes an open area quest, while at the same time keeping the option to do it as a regular adventure zone?

Eldorudo: Well, we've given a lot of thought, Jerry, to advancing the way we do things. We're always looking for new methods to try to make the game better, and that's one of the areas that we've thought about. We don't have anything, especially in Mod 8, immediately pending that we're trying new, but we definitely have a lot of ideas that we're working on, and in the future we should see some continual revamps of old areas and trying new things just to try and enhance them, make them more compelling and engaging for players moving forward. So as of right now, there's nothing I can speak of, but moving forward, there definitely will be some additions and tweaks, and we're always looking to make things more interesting and better for the players.

Jerry: Speaking of renovating older areas, I'm not 100% sure but, have you guys done a little bit to the Ruins of Threnal for Mod 8 here? It seems to look a little different when I was checking it out on Risia.

Eldorudo: Yeah, Threnal got a little bit of a visual revamp. As far as gameplay, nothing has been changed about that. But visually, it looks a little bit better. That's an area that we're still not done with yet, but we saw an opportunity to make some tweaks there and make it look a little bit more appealing, so we took that opportunity.

Jerry: Sure, sure. Yeah, I just happened to be in there, I was like, ya know, I can't remember and I don't normally play with my settings on very high but it looked really nice and I was thinking, man did you guys change it a bit?

Alright, next question comes from Sarezar: "Are there any plans to change or alter the way monster and quest collectables drop and are used? For example, will we see monsters drop collectables that currently drop only from decorations like alchemy labs, mushrooms, etc.? Will we see better rewards from NPC's or will they just be used in new Stone of Change recipes? Finally, will we see a better distribution among all levels? At the moment," he notes, "all high level quests drop only House Deneith ward collectables with a few exceptions. Are there any other changes in general and when?"

Kind of a multi-part question there. So what do ya think?

Tolero: We've already seen one additional collector of sorts when we did the Subterranean. There's actually the Planar Tokens that you can go and turn in to the fellow that stands outside. Not the event tokens, but he actually has a different series of items related to those which is a little different than the normal collectors.

Jerry: Sure, sure.

Eladrin: We've also changed the way in which collectables drop to make it easier to acquire them.

Jerry: What do ya mean by that?

Eladrin: When a monster is killed now, instead of having a sparkle on the corpse, which can be difficult in some instances where, like the fire elementals tend to float away, that sort of thing, or a monster explodes into a bunch of pieces like a skeleton or is totally destroyed by an ice weapon or a holy weapon. Now instead they'll drop a small purple treasure sack which you can click on to get your loot.

Jerry: Hmm. You know, actually I noticed that when I was on Korthos and I guess I thought maybe it was just part of the NPE thing, but that's a nice change I think to see that throughout the game.

Tharagrim: Hopefully in the future we'll have a couple more different things that we could work into the entire collectable system. Hopefully as new content gets out we'll be able to add additional collectables, things of that sort and also do more token reward-type vendors.

In the upcoming module, you'll see the same sort of thing that was with the Subterranean where there'll be particular runes that go out which can be traded for fabulous prizes, I guess would be a good way to put it. So pretty much, we're in the process of revamping it slowly as we can. I think it's a place where we do have a little bit of room to put in a couple of new cool things and we can expand it to make it a little bit more interesting and a little more robust.

Jerry: Well that sounds good. Sounds really good. Are we talking about armor upgrades there, because we read about that a little bit this week I think it was either in Ten Ton Hammer or Massively, their look at it.

Tharagrim: Yes, actually a lot of the stuff having to do with the token turn-ins for this next module have to do with armor upgrades and the system that we instituted for that. I'm really looking forward to the player feedback. I hope they really enjoy the changes that we made and the new armor type which is called Dragon Touched armor.

Jerry: Cool, cool. Maybe we can get into Dragon touched armor a little later as well if we have some more time.

Let me move on to the next question. This one comes from Petr, saying "Please tell someone from Turbine when you speak to them to make a new monster type: goblins. Kobolds are really nice, but I think when we have hobgoblins and bugbears we should have low level goblins for starter quests and low level fun. Goblins are great, and I think quite iconic monsters. Please tell this to someone at Turbine." So, I'm telling ya. Goblins?

Flimsy Firewood: Paragon Kobolds!

Jerry: Well that's true.

Eladrin: Kobolds hate goblins.

Jerry: Is that right?

Eladrin (?): Kobolds hate everyone.

Jerry: Yeah that’s right.

Eladrin?: Must smash big box!

Jerry: I guess, seriously though, is there any thought about adding goblins to maybe compliment our low level monster types?

Tolero: We're always looking at different creatures to add in. I haven't seen the specific list of which monsters are coming. I know that there's different kinds that we can go for for different levels. I mean, even the Sahaugin were a big change. It used to be that when you went into the lower levels, you're inundated with kobolds constantly. Well now, you're meeting a lot of different types of creatures right off the bat. You get to see a lot of the Sahaugin which first made their appearance in the Three Barrel Cove, or you get to see there's some interesting spiders that have been put in to the snow area of Korthos Island. We're always kind of investigating what places we can put some creatures that are gonna suprise ya.

Jerry: Cool. I should actually note, there's a p.s. to this question as well, saying "Looking on your website I got an idea when we saw the picture of the snow in the next Mod that they should make frost giants to the game." Well it looks like this guy was a bit psychic, because it sounds like we're gonna be seeing some frost giants, huh.

Eladrin: Yeah, that's a good idea.

Eldorudo: Yeah, we'll get those right in, actually.

Jerry: Yeah!

Eldorudo: We'll fast-track them.

Jerry: Nice.

Eladrin: How about some more white dragons too?

Jerry: Yeah that sounds good.

Eldorudo: Ok, yeah let's do that.

Tolero: We can SO put in a white dragon.

Eldorudo: How about a Paragon kobold archmage?

Eladrin: That's just crazy talk. Let's do it.

Jerry: Nice. Frost giant kobolds? We could have some kind of inter-breeding thing going on where you have a 20' tall kobold.

Eldorudo: That's just wrong, Jerry. That's wrong.

Eladrin: We did talk about the half-fiend gelatinous cube, though.

Tolero: We decided it would be red, like red Jell-O.

Jerry: Nice. A Christmas cube. Alright next question comes from Vyctor: "I was curious if in the next segment if you could ask the devs about the potential for adding double and reach weapons, specifically the spiked chain and, with the upcoming addition of half-orcs, the orc double axe." What do ya think, could we see - I know this has been talked about a little bit in the past, but are we any closer to maybe seeing double or extra long reach weapons?

Tharagrim: That's rather doubtful, Jerry. At this time, we have a number of different things we are working on. Those things just don't happen to be on the top of the priority list. We may have things like, possibly things like Drow longknives and Elven thin blades coming in, but right now we don't have any plan on putting on any double weapons or reach weapons like spiked chains.

Jerry: I imagine it would basically be a lot of coding work, huh.

Eladrin: A lot of animation work, really.

Jerry: Oh yeah, sure. All right, next question comes from Rezik: "Some of us have been playing since very early on and have never wavered from the game. One thing that would be very amenable to the old school players is that we can make our old 28 point builds bumped up to 32 points."

This guy writes, "It's always a monkey on my back knowing that character that I have been playing for two years and love will never be as optimal as his younger counterpart that isn't even possible without the elder's favor. Can we get the extra four points for one or more of our old 28 point builds?"

Maybe something we could move into favor, any possibility of a favor reward for maybe hitting 2000 or whatever on the old character?

Eladrin: One of the big problems we have with upgrading characters from 28 to 32 points is retroactivity and things along those lines. It is something that we're always thinking about, but, uh . . . you need to not distract me in the middle of a sentence.

Tolero: I'm trying to help . . .

Eladrin: . . . but +4 tomes in Mod 9! Really?

Tolero: Yeah.

Eladrin: Really?!?

Tolero: that's what I was trying to tell you.

Eladrin: Oh, wow!

(Django, maybe?): Yeah, actually they will be in Mod 9.

Eladrin: I'm gonna go back to drinking my iced tea.

Jerry: Really, did we just get a confirmation of +4 tomes in Mod 9?

(Hard to place the voice to a name, Tharagrim maybe?): Yup.

Jerry: Nice. Well I guess that would sort of solve that problem then, wouldn't it.

Tharagrim: Yeah, it's one of those funny things is that no matter pretty much whatever else I do, all the hours of work making hand crafted, really important, really cool items, people will look . . .

Eladrin: Where are my tomes?

Tharagrim: Exactly. People will be, just like where are my tomes?

Jerry: Hey, our DDO characters like to read. Reading is good. Next question comes from Michael Sr. "There are times when I break a barrel or crate and the item ends up dropping, but into a wall or pillar. I can see the sparkle visual but can't see the item. Is this being looked into?" Kind of a bug fix I think.

Eladrin: Yeah, actually I fixed it on my local machine and I accept bribes for checking it into the live branch.

Jerry: Nice.

Eladrin: Oh, ok fine. Yeah, we're looking into the scatter problems and we'll be taking care of them.

Jerry: Sure, sure.

Eldorudo: Eladrin really likes cookies, by the way.

Jerry: Alright, next question comes from Oakhart: "Will the dragonmark system be updated? More dragonmark related enhancements, feats, maybe discounts at House shops, vendors, etc.?"

Eladrin: I believe the thing that you'll be looking at first is the Dragonmark Heir prestige enhancement line. There are always plans for future upgrades.

Jerry: Sure. So maybe when we see the level cap increase, we might see a couple new Dragonmark Prestige enhancements?

Eladrin: I'm not sure if it'll come that early, but it is on our list of things to do.

Jerry: Oh, ok. Next question from Jason here, "Why are the Symbol spells cooldown timers linked, and why is there a cooldown timer so different from the standard?"

It's kind of one of those questions I've had as a cleric too. You cast Symbol of Persuasion and your Symbol of Pain or whatever also gets linked on a timer. Any thought about separating those out?

Eladrin: I think that's one we may not actually be able to answer right now because the quick and obvious truth would be because we hate them. But really, it was originally because of some sort of lingering spell effects limitation that I don't quite remember because I wasn't the person that did it. So I can't give a satisfactory answer to that right now without doing some research.

Tolero: It would have been a Zyrca question but she's not on the cast with us today.

Jerry: Well maybe we can have that one answered in an "Ask the Devs Unplugged" or something here in the future. All right, final official question from the submitters this week is "Is there any chance the devs would consider and allow the benefits of the Finesse feat to apply to Trip?"

Eladrin: Weapon Finesse?

Jerry: I think so, I assume that's what he's talking about.

Eladrin: Weapon Finesse should assist you with your Trip attempts on the roll to-hit already, if you're using a Finessable weapon.

Jerry: Alright, well I know I've taken some of your time but I just thought as long as I had you here maybe I could throw a couple of Mod 8 questions at you because obviously this is what you guys have been working on pretty hard, and we're just getting our first look-see at it on Risia and all that sort of thing. I wanted to ask you a little bit about maybe first off, we've seen some changes into the Marketplace, you know, where the old tent was, there's now some scaffolding and various towers and defense armaments and that sort of thing going up. Is this a symbol of things to come?

Eldorudo: Yeah, they're actually starting to rebuild the Marketplace. Not quite sure what will become of it. I guess we'll see in the upcoming months and years, but they've begun the process of rebuilding. We should see some updates as we move along here. This is just the first of many updates to the area.

Jerry: So eventually maybe, just throwing out a time frame here, maybe like a year from now or something, we'll see something kind of as an official replacement for the tent being built up over time?

Eldorudo: Unless, of course, the devils decide to strike back again.

Jerry: That's true too. You know Meridia has been added to the Teleportation and Greater Teleport list with Mod 8, but I noticed at least on Risia it wasn't added to the transporters. Any chance, this is kind of a personal question on my end, sorry for hogging the show with my personal questions, but that was one of mine. Any chance adding Meridia to the in-game teleporters for those of us who can't cast Teleport or Greater Teleport?

Tolero: You're talking the little doorway that's in the Houses?

Jerry: Exactly.

Tolero: Ok. Most of those doorways are setup right no to transport you between House wards as kind of a story thing. A lot of times players wanna be able to travel here, travel there for convenience, but in some cases we have to be really careful because we don't wanna be breaking people's story flow by doing that.

Jerry: Oh ok, sure. Right. Another question I guess I had is, it was mentioned in one of the third party press articles this week that we're seeing Hirelings on Risia right now and by all indications are looking pretty good by the way, but I understand maybe they're not going to be there right away at the start of Mod 8 going live. Can we get an elaboration on that? What do ya mean by that?

Tolero: Sure. What we're gonna be doing is Hirelings are a really elaborate system compared to a lot of things that we've put into the game. This isn't as simple as - not that making quests is simple, but we have a certain format we go through when we're doing quests - whereas now we're introducing a whole different type of AI into the game, so that's gonna require us to monitor it a little bit more closely even if everything goes absolutely, positively 100% great, there's still a need to watch how they work. Is this gonna cause a problem for a player, is this gonna cause any problem for the server, so we're gonna want to control the way that those get introduced to the players.

Initially, we're gonna let everyone dig into Module 8, you'll have your high level content and NPE, character gen, all that great stuff, and then once we're a little bit in, then we're gonna be announcing some Hireling events, where we can preview the Hirelings.

Jerry: So like in game live events involving Hirelings?

Tolero: Yeah, what we'll be doing is we'll be bringing the vendors in and we'll make an announcement when the vendors are available and encourage everybody to go in, grab a Hireling, and go try them out.

Jerry: And then eventually we will see them, presumably added permanently to the game with like, what, maybe an 8.1 patch or something of that nature?

Tolero: Right, as long as everything goes smoothly, then of course we'll be bringing them in. If things go really great, we might bring them sooner than we were hoping.

Jerry: Cool, cool.

Eladrin: We just wanna be able to have our hands on that on/off switch.

Jerry: Yeah. I can imagine. So how many hours did you guys spend on Hirelings? Was it in the hundreds?

Eladrin: All of them. Ask Codog.

Jerry: Unfortunately Codog isn't here to defend himself, but I can imagine.

Tolero: I did see him crawl out from his Hireling dungeon onto the forums the other day, so he's finally breathing the light away from the Hirelings. From the sounds of it, from talking to all the devs that have been working on it and getting my feelers out for 'What are these gonna be? How are they gonna work? What have we done with them?' Even though it's been a lot of work, the guys all have great stories about them and they seem to really enjoy them. I think it'll be a really good product once it's in, and players will really get a lot of use out of them.

Eldorudo: And after doing the monks and now the Hirelings, Codog's starting to resemble a Cozombie. He hasn't slept in about five or six months I think.

Jerry: Yeah, I bet.

Eldorudo: He might need some time for some shut-eye now.

Jerry: Sure. In regards to the storyline with Mod 8, obviously we don't want to get into spoilers or anything here, but are we seeing the end of the Reaver's Bane storyline with Mod 8?

Eldorudo: No. This is just a continuation of the storyline. This is sort of like the intermission, if you will. We had the opening, and this is the intermission, and we will probably have the third act coming soon, hopefully. Maybe more, but there's definitely a third act in the works.

Jerry: So one question I had in regards to Mod 8 here is sort of one developer really focuses on a dungeon there and I kinda heard that Django, you worked on one in particular or probably a whole bunch of them, but can you give me a look at something that maybe we can point to in Mod 8 and say hey Django did that?

Django: Well if you find yourself fighting Sahaugin and minions of the Devourer in the Wavecrest Tavern, you can blame that on me. If you find a certain pile of crystals and you need to look for some valves to turn off the coolant, you can blame that on me. You can think about blaming some other stuff, but I worked a little bit on the landscape, Keeper was working on that before she left, I did some monster spawns that was then rehashed by one of the other developers some too. So a lot of people had their hands in there. Overall it was pretty fun, I've played through these quests a lot of times and tried to keep the integrity of the quests and yet present to you a play experience for our players and trying to add some interest and some flair where we could.

Jerry: I have to say that the tavern brawl quest as I've been terming it is one of my favorites of the new low level stuff. Did you have inspiration one day when you were looking at redesigning the Old Sully's Grog quest and saying you know what, there should be a fight in the tavern?

Django: Yeah that’s roughly how it happened. I sat down and I wanted to rehash the tavern because it looked a little too big for a small island. So I cut out some links, you might notice that the tavern is a bit smaller then it used to be and looks a little different, but overall the tables are in the same place. That’s actually because it's the same tavern with the middle section cut out.

Jerry: Oh nice.

Django: So when I did that, I was kinda looking at it, and was like it would be kinda fun if I was running on top of the tables fighting guys, kinda like those old pirate movies where they're fighting on top of the mast and whatnot. So I went with that. It was fun.

Jerry: It was really an inspired decision as far as I'm concerned, like I said, it's one of my new favorites. So Flimsy, I know you worked, if I'm not mistaken, on some of the items and stuff as well, but did you work on some quests as well?

FlimsyFirewood: I'm actually one of the dungeon designers, so items are not really what I do.

Jerry: Oh no, nevermind, that was Tharagrim, actually.

FlimsyFirewood: But I am kind of responsible for one item that already made it on a screenshot on the live forums that people were complaining about.

Jerry: Oh no.

FlimsyFirewood: Yeah. The masterwork toothpick.

Jerry: Oh, ok.

FlimsyFirewood: Yeah it has quite a story, but I don't want to spoil it yet.

Jerry: Sure. Now, who worked on the puzzles for this new high-end stuff, because we're reading this week on the third party site about some of these puzzles. Was that you as well Flimsy?

FlimsyFirewood: Which puzzles are you referring to?

Jerry: I guess in the high level content and some of the Reaver's Refuge quests?

FlimsyFirewood: Reaver's Refuge was Django. I mean, the jumping.

Jerry: Oh, ok.

FlimsyFirewood: I did the puzzles in the Monastery of the Scorpion and the Prey on the Hunter but that's not really much of a puzzle quest. It's more of a run and smash and smash and run some more.

Jerry: Alright, well I don't wanna take too much of your time but I guess I should probably wrap this up by asking the big question that everybody seems to be asking, and that is when is Mod 8 coming out? When is Mod 8 coming out? When is Mod 8 coming out?

Tolero: Sooooon! Seriously soon. It's so soon that it would sneak up and bite you.

Jerry: Well let me ask you this, this show airs on Saturday . . .

Eldorudo: Ow! It just bit me!

Jerry: Will it be up by the time the show is up?

Tolero: Your show usually runs on Saturday, and we're here in the middle of the week right now, so you won't see it then. This is such awkward timing for the recording because this week we're gonna actually be doing a Hireling event on Risia so we wanna get that feedback under our belt first, and then we'll have Mod 8 shortly thereafter. I'll have all the announcements and the WOOHOO! MOD 8 IS COMING! REJOICE! type stuff for ya.

Jerry: Yeah, well that sounds good. All right well I think I've taken about as much of your guy's time as I can this evening here. Thanks for all the work you guys have been doing on Mod 8 and a little bit of what we've already heard about Mod 9. Sounds like you guys are working hard, and not hardly working. So we really do appreciate it.

Tolero: There's gonna be a lot of good stuff.

Jerry: All right, with me this week on "Ask the Devs" is Eldorudo, Eladrin, FlimsyFirewood, Tharagrim, Django, and Nanook. Thanks everyone - oh, and Tolero. Thanks everyone for being on the show.

Eldorudo: Thank you very much Jerry. I always love coming on the show with you.

Eladrin: Thanks Jerry.

FlimsyFirewood: Thanks for having us.

Nanook: Thanks Jerry, it was fun being my first time here.

Jerry: Yep, yep.

Django: Thanks again.

Tolero: Thanks Jerry.

###

Just a reminder that if you’d like to ask a question for Ask the Devs, send it to ddocast@gmail.com. Please tag your question with Ask the Devs, just to help me keep things organized!

Jerry
I now work for Turbine!
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Jerry
Member Avatar
The Host Of DDOcast.
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
Available in .pdf HERE and .doc HERE as well.

Ask The Devs #9 Transcript
As heard on DDOcast Episode 126, July 18th, 2009
www.ddocast.com
Note: If you have a question you would like asked on “Ask the Devs”, please send Jerry Snook an email at ddocast@gmail.com. Please include a name (character name or real name, whatever) in your email.
###
Jerry: Welcome to the ninth edition, yeah, can you believe it - it’s been nine times we’ve done this - of ‘Ask the Devs’. A chance for you to ask some questions and get some answers from the Turbine community team and dev team and production team. You know, I just thought about that recently, that we call it ‘Ask the Devs’ but it really encompasses more than just the DDO developers so maybe I guess you’ll have to take the name with a little bit of a grain of salt.
Jerry: Alright who‘s with me this week? Well first off, I really want to welcome to DDOcast for the first time Fernando Paiz, co-executive producer for DDO. How you doing Fernando?
Fernando: Hi Jerry how’s it going? Doing alright!
Jerry: I’ve been reading a lot of articles - you’ve been busy in the press doing tons of tons of interviews and it’s my first chance I think to really sit down and talk to you here, so it’s really good.
Fernando: Yeah that’s right we’ve been having fun talking up Dungeons and Dragons Eberron Unlimited with all kinds of people and I think it bodes well for our launch. So we’re very excited thought - it has been a bit of a marathon launch so far.
Jerry: Not to get too distracted here but I know that for some of us veterans here you’re a relatively new name although I guess you’ve been with Turbine for a little while, can I ask how long you’ve been on the DDO production team here?
Fernando: Yeah no problem, I’ve been with the DDO production team since the end of last year. So, a pretty good long while now and, you know, I guess I joined sometime in the last quarter of last year. I’ve actually been with Turbine for quite a long time. Sometime in September it’ll be my five year anniversary in Turbine, and DDO was actually the first game I worked on when I joined Turbine as director of game technology so I feel like I’ve been on the DDO team for almost five years.
Jerry: Well that’s cool, and, well thanks – and of course you’re married as well to Kate Paiz, the other co-executive producer at DDO, we’ve got a husband and wife team. It’s a classic in fantasy, we’ve got a lot of husband and wife teams writing books and making movies and now producing MMO video games based on D&D. So congratulations and thanks for being on the show. Also with us is producer Glin. How you doing Glin?
Glin: Doing good Jerry, I’m glad to be back on the show, it’s been several months since I’ve had a chat with you at all.
Jerry: Yeah I know! I was actually looking at the archives it looks like March was the last time we had an Ask the Devs. Now obviously you guys have been really quite busy and so the scheduling hasn’t worked out for either of us but I’m really glad we’re able to do it.
Glin: Yeah I think that was the time we really started to hunker down and get ready to release all the news about what our next release was going to be, so we didn’t necessarily go radio silent we were just preparing to do all the media blasts and all those things that we’re seeing now in Beta.
Jerry: Yeah absolutely. Also with us is MadFloyd – how you doing?
MadFloyd: I’m doing well, nice to be here.
Jerry: For those who may be not as familiar with you, what in particular would you say your focus is on DDO?
MadFloyd: I’m a design director, so basically I’m working here behind the scenes to make the game as good as possible. I’ve been here for about a year and a half now.
Jerry: Finally with us here is Tolero. How you doing Tolero?
Tolero: Oh not bad how about you?
Jerry: Doing great! Thanks for helping me get this ninth edition of ‘Ask the Devs’ under way, and let’s get underway - we’ve got a long list of questions and we want to get as many answered as we can this week. Just a quick note at the start, if you want to ask a question to ‘Ask the Devs’ send it to me in an email, I pass it along to Tolero and we work to put together these questions for the show, and the email is ddocast@gmail.com.
Jerry: Alright first question comes from Zadkiel: Previous modules were less about revenue generation and more about customer retention. Now that DDO Unlimited is being released and modules will generate revenue via the free to play player having to buy them, will that mean more new content being released faster? I guess maybe we should kind of turn this into a two-parter a little bit? Well we had, kind of in the early days of the game, three to four month-ish sorta release date schedule. Do you guys see that being sort what we might see with Eberron Unlimited?
Fernando: Well first of all Jerry, I’d be very hesitant to commit to a particular sort of timing cycle because we’re always trying to do the right thing for the service, and for the given update that we’re working on and some things take longer than others and that’s just a reality of development.
Jerry: Sure, Sure
Fernando: But that said, yeah absolutely we’re looking to get back into a rhythm of much more regular updates, the time between module eight and Eberron Unlimited going live is absolutely an anomaly, believe us, we hate is as much as you guys do, we would have like to have been releasing new stuff to you all the time and since we’re mostly all DDO players on the team as well, we’ve all been itching to get our hands on the new stuff to play on live, so that continues right now: we’re eager to do it.
One thing I would like to share with you is some details on our first update, so we’re going to start numbering again and call it ‘Update One’, and you may have seen in some of the other press articles, we’re working on a new set of adventure packs right now tentatively titled ‘Dreaming Dark’, and so the ‘Dreaming Dark’ is this really cool story line that we have worked out for high level players, wherein there’s these creatures coming into Stormreach and essentially trying to take over the minds of some of the citizens of Stormreach and find their way to brainwash people almost into this cult sort of thing. And the players get to go in and investigate these guys and even wander into some of the nightmares that they’re trapping some of these other characters in, and it’s really fun, we’re having a great time providing, you know, different kinds of gameplay and enemies than what the players will be used to with all the demon and devils and stuff like that, that they’ve been playing at high levels.
Jerry: That’s cool…
Glin: And if that doesn’t give it away Jerry, Fernando mentioned that we’re already in there playing it, so it’s not like we’re coming up with the ideas; we know what it’s going to be like – it’s something we’re going to be having ready for the next release and we’re going to be working on this next release as soon as we’re out the door with this current one which we’ve put the release date out of early August.
Jerry: That’s excellent. You know, I think a lot of us probably assume that, I mean, development cycles work in phases so while you’re polishing up mod9 you’re probably already working on mod10 at least probably in the planning stages, I think that’s what most people would probably assume here. In the past, I can’t remember where it was said, but is mod... well I guess mod 0 – the adventure cycle previously known as mod9 - is that going to end the Shavarath story line? I seem to recall that the answer is ‘no’ on that one – do you know if that’s the case? Do you know? I think I read it in a past interview that someone had said that it was not – and we would be continuing it after this, but do you know, if that’s…?
MadFloyd: Yeah it’s not the end of it. When we first created the Shavarath storyline we envisioned it as a multipart – well at least more than one part and so far we’ve done part one so we’re not exactly sure when we’ll return to it, but we will at some point.
Jerry: Yeah it’s probably something like your other releases, I suppose in general asking this question here, it’s not like you didn’t have a financial incentive to get new content out the door for the past three-some years, but I imagine there probably is some fundamental truth to this especially as you want to encourage free to play players to explore the game and you know pick up these new adventure packs that is a bit of a financial incentive for you guys to basically, you know, get them out polished, but get them out probably as quickly as you can, you know?
Fernando: Absolutely, and that’s one of the neat things about the new business model, we’ve always had our subscribers out there and different subscribers come and tell us what they want and for some players it’s new races and for some players it’s new content at level cap and for some players it’s actually new content in the middle of the game and it’s always been all over the map and a little bit hard to quantify. With this new model we’ll simply be able to see what are players are buying and you’re essentially voting with your wallet, now that’s not to say we won’t always have our subscribers and we will have to keep paying attention to what the subscribers want and feed that into the mix, but a big part our decisions going forward will be about seeing what works in the current store and what people are buying up.
Jerry: Sure. Alright let’s move onto the second question here.
I don’t have a name unfortunately on this one but this person writes in regards to Eberron Unlimited,
“Let’s say I’m playing DDO as a free player and I buy whatever I need to, to unlock some content I can’t get to otherwise.” He’s probably talking about say, you know, adventure packs,”How long does that content stay unlocked for me? If the answer is: once you unlock content then it stays unlocked forever, then doesn’t that mean I should just get a free account, and buy everything in the game and turn my free account into kind of a lifetime membership account?”
That’s sort of a fundamental question I know a lot of players are asking, you know, you guys have talked to quite a few in your interviews about incentives for VIP players – is there an intention potentially that, especially maybe us hardcore folks that will be playing until you guys shut down the servers in 2050 or whatever, that maybe we would just go for kind of a lifetime membership option here?
Fernando: Well, I don’t know about intention. We certainly built the model with an eye towards letting more casual players be able to come in and play at their pace. So that was our intent. But like so many things we start something with one intent and it ends up having more than one use so yeah the answer is absolutely: If you buy the Sharn Syndicate, you can play the Sharn Syndicate on every game world with every character that you create from then on, and you essentially have a subscription, if you want to think of it that way, to that piece of content for the life of the service. So that is like the lifetime subscription option that was offered in Lord of the Rings at launch, for example.
Jerry: yeah
Fernando: Now, again, there’s an interesting dynamic here where those purchasers will be either the very casual players, or the very hardcore players who say ‘I know that I love this game and I’m going to play it for two years – so I’m going to go ahead and buy everything with a onetime fee’ – but that’s the trade off – you’re either committed for a couple of years or you’re just sampling early on and sort of everything in-between… if you’re playing very hard core but not committing for two years, the subscription is still a pretty good deal to pay one fee as you go per month.
Jerry: And you guys have worked to build in some nice VIP incentives it seems as well, with essentially free turbine points, potential a little bit of early access to some new content – at least we get, you know, Eberron Unlimited a few days early here.
Fernando: Yeah that’s right and we’ll keep working on what those VIP incentives are, there’s things like the shared account tab which are given for free to the VIPs and you have to purchase if not – some of these you can buy into, but some of them, like getting the content a few days early will always remain VIP exclusives, and it is important for us that our VIP players feel valued and important because they absolutely will be the backbone that we’re gonna expand this community with.
Jerry: I don’t want to sound too much like a PR person here, but it seems pretty obvious that what you guys are trying to do with Eberron Unlimited here is basically give people flexibility and options, you know, whatever, however, you want to play the game, we’ve got a system and an easy way to do it.
Fernando: That’s pretty much our mantra. Play and pay however fits your lifestyle and your playstyle.
Jerry: Sure. Alright let’s move onto question number three. This one comes from Kistilan:
Says: “Is the DDO dev team considering the option to offer a full character respec service? If yes, do they think it would be a premium service or a free in game service utilizing questing, items and in game currency?”
We’re heard a little bit about character respecing in the past, but with Eberron Unlimited coming here, could we maybe see it in the store, someday, down the road?
Glin: That’s actually one of the things that we’re targeting for release – it’s really going to be something that our VIPs are looking for – I’m sorry our current subscribers – but it’s actually going to be something we have as a store option. Those players who, at various levels, feel like they want a ‘respec’ as we’ll call it until we release all the features, will be able to either early in the game or late in the game take advantage of our new concept for respeccing their character.
Jerry: Do we have any, sort of, general thought on the timeline here? Is it kind of far off or maybe a little bit sooner would you describe it?
Fernando: It’s going to be on the sooner side but we can’t necessarily commit to whether it’s going to make Update 1 or Update 2 at this point. (Jerry adds in transcript: you can actually hear my gasp here…)
Some of these things are still in the middle of development and we’re trying to figure out when they’re going to get out of QA. But, needless to say, we heard the cries of the community that they want respec – it’s something they’ve been clamoring for, we’d like to give it to them. It’s a perfect type of feature to offer in the store and we’re going to find a way to do that, sooner rather than later, but don’t hold me to a specific timeline.
Jerry: Now obviously you guys probably aren’t ready to get into too many details but we’re talking a full character respec are we talking about things including, like, levels and skills which you currently can’t respec in DDO?
Glin: We’re talking about taking your experience and rebuilding your character is kind of the quick summary of it. We have several systems in play here but I think that’s probably the elevator pitch.
Jerry: Well that sounds great – and I won’t press you for too many more details but thanks for actually talking about that on DDOcast, I think you’ve made a little bit of news here and probably a lot of players pretty happy.
Glin: yeah, vague but exclusive!
Jerry: Yes, exactly! Ok next question comes from Corsec who writes: is there any possibility that items could be locked in the inventory itself? He comes up with an explanation but I sort of thought I’d try to summarize it more succinctly. Right now, when you equip something and then equip something else it sort of moves somewhere else in your backpack. Is there any thought about having a permanent location so it would go back to where it was, things like that?
MadFloyd: I love this question – I think about this every day, because it’s one of my pet peeves. Yeah, we’re actually looking at various ways we can potentially address this issue. I can’t say when it will come because, like anything else we have so much on the burner here and everything sort of gets prioritized and some things are more complex than others, but inventory management and sort of improving the player experience with regard to that is definitely a hot issue here.
Jerry: Sure. Part two of his question: Has it ever been asked or planned to get the damage output of summoned creatures into your combat log?
MadFloyd: Yes it has. It’s another thing that we’re definitely considering doing. The question is – when?
Jerry: Sure. Sure. Alright let’s move onto the next question here. This one I also didn’t have a name for - actually I think I did have a name at some point but I lost it in my notes. So sorry that I’m not naming you by name, but short and quick – the next question is: ‘Please repeat the half-orc question!’
So, what about half-orcs – do we have any kind of status update on them?
Fernando: Yeah, half-orcs have been a long time coming, and we know that.
The truth of the matter is, we went down an implementation path with half-orcs that we couldn’t get all the way to fruition and other things ended up taking priority and were bumped ahead of it so, don’t want to lie to our listeners here, half-orc is not coming in the very near future, we do have design documents and prototypes floating around the team, and, you know, it’ll sort of depend on what gets agreed on between the development team and marketing as what our next priorities end up being for the next several months.
I guess the best thing I say is, if the warforged and the drow and the like sell well in the store, you’ll see a better chance of us kicking up the half-orc pretty soon because it is the next one queued up.
Jerry: Yeah bet so, bet so. I imagine that’s fairly common in video game development too where, you know, things get shuffled around like that where, ‘ok, well, we’re working on the favored soul, we’re working on the half-orc maybe we have some technical issues with half-orc, favored soul is coming along great so let’s, say, push that sort of thing forward.’
Fernando: Exactly right, and we’re making those tradeoffs all the time – for every feature that you guys see go live there’s probably another one or two that were left at some stage of development further back.
Jerry: Alright, next question comes from Gaulston from the Thelanis server. He writes: Are there any plans to introduce two handed puncturing weapons, in particular, he writes, spears?
MadFloyd: well we probably don’t have plans to introduce entirely new weapon types, but we do have a two handed weapon that deals puncturing damage that will come as a reward in update 1 actually
Jerry: Really?
MadFloyd: We do. I believe it’s a ‘bladed staff’.
Tolero: All I know, the first time I saw it I ran in and said ‘SPEAR!’
Jerry: I know, I think you’ve just floored me here – my jaw’s on the floor.
People have been asking for that one for, a certain segment of people have been asking for that one for, quite a while. That’s pretty exciting news there actually… so.
Alright, next part of Gaulston’s question is: In regards to the Shroud raid, are there any plans to increase the drop rate of large devil scales? He goes onto explain a little bit about basically how difficult they can sometimes be to get in the Shroud raid so do we have kind of a thought on large devil scales?
MadFloyd: Well, they pretty much drop at the same rate as other, non horn, large ingredients, so we don’t really have any plans to change the drop rate at this time.
Jerry: kind of in regards to the Shroud raid question, Xiloscient from DDOcast noticed on Lamannia while running one of the new Shavarath quests – and I can’t remember if he saw it in the outdoor area or not – that a large devil scale dropped. So can we assume that this wasn’t a bug and maybe these large scales are going to be moving into the Shavarath plane as well?
MadFloyd: That’s correct. That’s not a bug – that’s intentional!
Jerry: That’s er, I guess that makes sense, because if they’re hoarding them in the Shroud they’ll probably be hoarding them in their home plane as well?
Tolero: You would have to imagine that where devils live they shed some scales.
Jerry: yeah.
Fernando(?): or for that matter where they’re beat up on the battlefield. It’s the devils’ battlefield!
Jerry: yeah that’s right, that’s right. Alright, next question here comes from Devastation 2 from Khyber.
This is a particularly crunchy question, I hope you guys can answer it, I’m just going to read it straight:
“Rogues get their subtle backstabbing enhancement, where level one gives you 10% hate reduction, level two is 20% and level three is 30% hate reduction. Treason, the named short sword form the Stormreaver has an ability which is 20% hate reduction. My question is a two-parter: 1. Does Treason stack with subtle backstabbing, so if I have two levels of subtle backstabbing and wielding Treason will I have a 40% hate reduction?”
MadFloyd: Actually it does stack but you have something like a 36% hate reduction, so you would have 20% for the subtle backstabbing and you’d get 20% for treason, but they’re not purely additive so basically it’s sort of like 80% times 80% so you sort of get like 64% as a result.
Jerry: Oh ok, so it would essentially stack on top of that other 20%
MadFloyd: that’s correct.
Jerry: Question 2 here: Does the treason effect affect weapons in your offhand – so wielding treason in my main hand and welding a +2 dagger in my offhand would my offhand gain the benefit of the treason’s 20% hate reduction?
MadFloyd: Yes, it would because basically what that does is reduce thread generated by any melee damage, and that would include whatever your offhand is doing as well.
Jerry: Alright. Nice.
Glin: I gotta tell you MadFloyd I’m impressed with that - that was so crunchy my teeth are just hearing it, so, you fielded that really well.
Jerry: Yeah I agree that was very well done, thank you.
Jerry: Next one comes from Errick, from the guild I happen to be on Sarlona, Sacred Flame Guardians – he sent in a question, he wanted to see about offline guild chat, outside of the game. He writes: Say I’m at work and don’t have the ability to login and play, or maybe I want to hit the chat and talk with his fellow guildies. He says: I know this would be extra and some would argue probably not worth it, but still a bit of fun. So what do you think? Any possibility of offline guild chat?
Tolero: Um, one of the things you’re going to see once we bring DDO Unlimited is we’re going to be introducing a lot more activity that you can still feel connected with the community and connected with the game even when you aren’t able to play, besides just forum interaction and compendium interaction, one of the new things we’ll be bringing to DDO is my.ddo.com – and what that’s going to allow you to do is in addition to be able to make player blogs and have a record of your character offline, you’ll also be able to have guild blogs where you can get all of your guild members together to hang out on the my.ddo page – a lot of this web tech is going to be the groundwork for more and more features that we can bring to help you feel like you’re part of the community even when you can’t be there.
Jerry: Wow you weren’t kidding Fernando! I guess I read in an interview a couple of months ago that you were hoping to bring more social networking to DDO and it looks like that’s what we’re seeing here.
Tolero: Yeah exactly, you know, for a lot of players it’s really important for them to be able to stay connected with their friends and with their guildmates, you know, a lot of people like, you know, you want to plan that raid ahead of time, you know, you want to find our ‘Oh I was on vacation for two weeks, what am I missing out on?’ things like that.
Jerry: yeah, Yeah
Fernando: Yeah this is actually something that we haven’t spent a lot of time talking with the press of the community but I think really our players are going to be blown away by the level of features that we’re going to be bringing to the websites in support of DDO.
If you’ve ever looked at my.lotro.com – you’ll get an ideal of the feature set that they have there with the player blogs and pages and tracking your achievements and viewing your character and equipment while you’re offline, and that’s just the beginning: We’re going to launch with a similar offering of feature set but you can expect that to get better and better over time and it’s going to get really cool, really fast.
Jerry: Just the idea of being able to look at your character sheet offline is going to just absolutely… probably thousands of people are cheering right now as they’re listening to this!
Tolero: It even gets detailed – I’ve seen some of the prototypes work from a lot of the web devs, you can see things like your inventory offline, you can mouse over and say ‘Oh,they’re wearing the such-and-such item on, you know, their eye slot’ or ‘Oh, they’re wearing such-and-such boots’ – you know, they’re still refining a lot of what you’ll be able to see but, you know, the aim is to be very detailed.
Jerry: Well I think that’s good for helping to put together DDOcast shownotes! I don’t know how many times I’ve thought ‘Oh, I was going to write this down, and now I have to log back into the game, you know, get the thing, log back out’ – so fantastic news there.
Jerry: Alright, next question comes from Jeremy, saying: Can we can get an update on the forums with our signatures? For the DDO.com forums apparently so maybe there’s a few signature issues?
Tolero: Yeah, so that’s another area where a lot of the tech that we’re going to be using for the my.ddo is going to help us with the signatures. There were some issues with the way that the game was trying to talk to the website, so you would see some kind of, you know, anomalies in your signature such as characters who weren’t there or characters that should be there, showing up in strange states, and a lot of the tech that we’re using with my.ddo is going to help us resolve a lot of those [issues] so you’ll see more of those character signatures as a result.
Jerry: Fantastic! Alright next question comes all the way over from Sweden. This is Stefan Blomberg, who writes:
“I wonder, are there any plans to make returning characters more attractive to play? And by returning, he means, say, returning throwing weapons.” Any thoughts on that?
Tolero; You mean like returning shuriken, returning arrow, things like that?
Jerry: Yeah exactly, things like that.
MadFloyd: Well throwing weapons are generally intended to support a character by giving them some ranged options rather than being their primary focus, but we’ve been experimenting with a few grenade like weapons that rogues may be able to make from scavenged trap parts in a future update sometime down the line, but we’re hoping that the thrown weapon focus characters may enjoy those, but typically with the shuriken and stuff like that, it’s never intended to be a primary role, per say.
Jerry: I keep a returning shuriken on my cleric, so that when I run out of ammo I still have something to throw.
Tolero: Yup, I do the same thing.
Glin: Yeah I kept a returning axe on my fighter for like, level seven before it was finally just so useless in damage, but I was really hooked on that thing.
Jerry: Yeah Stefan in particular, he writes in this email that he has a returning speced character on the European devourer server called ‘Pingy’ – a funny rogue that uses returning weapons, I thought we’d give a shout out to Pingy there for being unique, fighting the good fight for all of us.
Jerry: Ok next question I believe comes from Phlor, although I didn’t write that down in my notes unfortunately. A bit of a philosophical and also a bit of a crunchy question. He writes something that I bet many people have asked:
“Why is it so difficult to pull a bloodstone?”
<laughs>
Jerry: Let me, I guess, ask philosophically first. Do you have an answer to the age old question of why it is that the things we most want to obtain are often the hardest to get?
MadFloyd: <Sighs> Because: ‘The chase is much more fun?’. I don’t know how to answer that, as a matter of fact It’s an interesting question. I sort of looked over to Eladrin and said ‘Can you help me with this one?’ so his response was ‘One: Because your luck is terrible!’ And I think also – ‘If Xilo pulls a muckdoom and nobody see does it really exist?’
Jerry: Exactly
Glin: Well if you have a screenshot!
MadFloyd: Well his answer to that ‘If I didn’t see it either, then it probably rotted in the chest, very sad!’
Jerry: Yery good point. I guess probably in terms of the sort of hard answer to this question, it’s one of the more powerful items in the game, so it’s probably on that, you know, you have to roll probably pretty high on the loot tables to get it. I’m assuming – I’m speaking for you but I assume that’s the case, right?
MadFloyd: Yeah, and I think the rare items exist throughout the game so, I guess, you get that moment of feeling special and you can have something to chase after if you really want it, so, you know, you never have to get it, you don’t need that bloodstone to succeed in the game necessarily, but if it’s important to you then you’ll find it sooner or later or you’ll buy it off some friend off the auction house or something.
Jerry: Yeah, you know, there was actually one other aspect of this whole bloodstone question I wanted to bring up. I assume you guys are familiar with the iPhone and the concept of the app store? There was a while back, there was this “I’m rich” app – it was like $5000 just someone put out there and all it did was, you hit a button and it, I don’t know, gave you a little dollar sign or something. And the guy sold like five of them, so literally a nothing app that just says ‘Give me $5000 and get nothing in return essentially’ the guy made like $25,000.
Tolero: Hmm
Jerry: Now I know that you guys have done a very nice job on the DDO Store balancing, but it occurred to me last night as I was brushing my teeth, just theoretically, if you guys put that on the DDO Store (the Bloodstone) and let’s just not be realistic here: let’s say charge $200 for it, I bet you’d have some people who would plop down that money.
Tolero: I’m sure there’s a lot of things, you know, in theory you could put something in the store that you’d be like ‘No one would ever ever buy that’ and somebody would do it inevitably that’s just Murphy’s Law.
Jerry: Yeah absolutely. Alright, next question here. Tim asks:
“Can we fix quivers so they can be hot-swapped via hot-keys and not opened so that we can quickly swap different types of arrows in our quivers out to be reloaded.”
MadFloyd: Well I think that’s a good suggestion actually, you know, I would appreciate that myself, I think that’s… honestly I don’t think we have that on our list of to-dos but we can put that on the list because I think that’s a great idea.
Jerry: Sure. Alright, last question – well one of the last questions I guess I have on my list here, and again I don’t have the name, see it’s been since March since we recorded this and I’ve been getting emails and questions and copying and pasting them into new documents, and unfortunately somewhere between March and July here I lost a whole bunch of names so I don’t know who asked this question either I’m sorry. It says:
“Playing in Linux with DDO as it stands right now, runs fine. Thanks to LOTROlinux.com since the DDO launcher doesn’t work in WINE.? But, “he says he tried to install the mod9 unlimited beta, with no luck. ‘If they’re going to break my ability to play my favorite game, I will be not very happy about it – not sure what I’ll do then’. So, have you guys given any consideration as to whether it works in Linux or whether it may be something you deal with in the future here?
MadFloyd(?): Yeah, I guess I’ll address that briefly. The first quick thing to say is, you know, Linux is only half supported as the guys over in LOTROLinux know – they found a way to basically get the patching to work and get in game, and our tech guys, some of which are pretty hardcore Linux guys themselves have taken it upon themselves to support that community and help keep people playing in Linux and so I guess the short answer is, if you have no trouble patching up mod8 there’s no reason that you should have any trouble patching up mod9 or Eberron Unlimited when we go live with that.
What is true is that you probably can’t use our background downloader application, which is the Turbine Download Manager, in Linux right now just the same way you can’t use the launcher really, and I don’t expect we’re going to put much effort into fixing that but at the same time I don’t think that community will be out of luck once we go live.
Jerry: Yeah I’m not really techie enough to give a really good answer but I seem to recall, I know in my own experience, there is a way you can just launch the game without going through the Turbine Download Manager if you really want to and I’m sure a quick check of the forum will help you out on that one.
MadFloyd: Well our current community doesn’t have the download manager, and there are no plans right now to make everybody get the download manager. It’ll be new players who will have the option to come in with the download manager.
Jerry: Oh is that right? I thought we had the download manager in beta on Lamannia here?
MadFloyd: And we were all new players on Lamannia!
Jerry: Ok I see what you’re saying.
Glin: That was the way we were distributing the build and it was also a good way for us to get a lot of hands on testing on the download manager so we’re comfortable putting the mass amounts of people that are going to come out and try the new DDO and game quickly.
Tolero: Yeah, and there might even still be players, maybe they played DDO back in, you know, 2006 and they hear about free to play and they’re like ‘Ooh – I want to check out DDO’ but you know maybe they uninstalled DDO and maybe they’re going to try and fire it back up again, so it was really good for us to see feedback not only from brand-brand new players but also somebody who’s going to download it from the sites you know, not knowing any better and try to go through that TDM experience with an existing account.
Jerry: You know, we’ve seen the TDM, as it’s being called in shorthand here, really improve dramatically, I think - because we saw it, was it earlier this year, briefly?
Tolero: Yeah, I think early in the spring we had it out a little bit.
Jerry: You can really see the changes and it’s a lot more stable and a lot more… well it works a lot better for a lot more people. So that’s a good thing.
Jerry: Ok let’s see here, I guess maybe I just want to ask you guys, since it’s been six months, is there anything else you might be able to reveal to us today here on DDOCast?
Fernando: Well Jerry, there is actually one thing that we’ve continued to keep super secret here and maybe not vast and mysterious but certainly been a little secret from our community and I do have some news to break exclusively with you today.
Jerry: ooh.
Fernando: So, the new that I want to share is that, Kate, my dear wife and your beloved producer on this game for the last three years is going to be leaving the project for a while and the reason for that is because we’re actually having our third child, a new daughter that we’re welcoming to the world and, in fact, our ‘launch day’ for that release turns out to be exactly the same day as the Eberron Unlimited launch date, wouldn’t you know!
Jerry: Oh, wow!
Glin: As fate would have it.
Jerry: Wow you’re going to be a busy busy person that day, although obviously the family comes first, so I imagine it’s going to be one of those things where ‘Don’t call me unless the servers are in flames or something like that’.
Fernando: Actually, Kate and the baby have been well notified that they have to deliver early, unlike the game which will not come before August 4th. The baby needs to show up about a week sooner than that.
Jerry: Well congratulations! That’s very exciting news I’m really pleased to hear that and I want to congratulate you on, I guess what, your new hireling?
Fernando: Yeah exactly, right, well level one human anyway!
Jerry: Yeah exactly. Well fantastic, ok and that’s going to wrap it up for ‘Ask the Devs’ this week. Thanks so much for being on this show. Just a quick reminder to the listeners here again that if you have a question that you want answered on Ask the Devs send it to ddocast@gmail.com, we’ll add it to our big old list – can’t promise we’ll get to every question but we’ll do our best to answer as many as we can on the show. So Fernando Paiz, Glin, MadFloyd and Tolero – thanks so much for being on DDOcast this week.
All: Great! Thanks for having us.

###
DDOcast is distributed under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial license. Feel free to post any or all of this document on your web site, forums, etc, but please let people know that it came from DDOcast. In terms of the “non-commercial” license, if you aren’t trying to sell this stuff on CD or make an unethical buck off of it, don’t worry about it and distribute this transcript as much as you would like.
–Jerry Snook, host DDOcast
Transcript by Willphase (Garth on Sarlona).
Additional formatting and transcription title work by Jerry
July 23rd, 2009
###


Edited by Jerry, Jul 23 2009, 01:16 PM.
I now work for Turbine!
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Jerry
Member Avatar
The Host Of DDOcast.
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
DDOcast/Ask the Devs 10

From Episode 148 (12-19-09)

Available here: http://www.cyberears.com/cybrss/8157.mp3

Host: Jerry

Turbine participation: Tolero, Glin (producer), Knockback (content designer), MadFloyd (design director), Genasi (systems designer)

THE NOTES:

- No plans to add ability to put mithril property onto armor or weapons right now, but would like to add more rituals in the future.

- Adventure Compendium/UI changes coming in the next few updates! Raid completions a “great example” of something they want to bring to the adventure compendium, along with other in-game commands that do not have corresponding UI buttons/features.

- No plans to add Practiced Spellcaster feat to DDO for balance reasons, among other things.

- Summon monster improvements coming! Selectors possible to determine kind of summon/number of summons. Also, Turbine is working to make summons last until they die rather than be tied to the cooldown. Other changes being looked at too.

- Tech limitation prevents ability to change last name in DDO. Tolero: If future changes will allow it at some point in the future, it will be considered.

- No plans to increase the VIP plat cap. Glin says related to 32 bit code, would need to update DDO to 64 bit code to up the 4+million plat cap.

- No Lotro-like Lifetime Subscription option coming, due to the DDO:U business model change with DDO Store and the ability to “customize own package.”

- Searing Heights getting new stuff soon! A “new organization” will be setting up shop in there. Assuming they were talking about new quests, but they didn’t specifically say that.

- “Everybody was very pleased” with the way the tutorial NPC voice work turned out, would love to do it in the future for an event or other appropriate place.

- Teasers about Dreaming Dark, chat about the story and the way it fits into the Eberron setting.

- No plans to increase Free to Play AFK logout time. Currently five minutes for people who have never made a purchase in the DDO Store (aka – have become Premium members). Simple purchase doubles time to ten minutes, VIP's get an hour!

- EPIC CONTENT: Why no epic in Update Two? High level pack meant didn’t make sense this time, but hope going forward that every update will have some sort of epic content for high-level players.

- Discussion of Dreaming Dark solo-only dungeon.

END

If you would like to submit a question for an upcoming Ask the Devs on DDOcast, please email me at ddocast@gmail.com or leave me a voice message at www.snapvine.com/ddocast. You can also leave your question in a stickied thread on the DDOcast forums. If you want to make it easier for me to organize, please put Ask the Devs in the title of the email, but it's not necessary.

Thanks!

Jerry
I now work for Turbine!
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Drfirewater
Killer of Threads
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
sorry delete this post i posted on wrong forum
Edited by Drfirewater, Dec 31 2009, 09:41 AM.
Posted Image

http://my.ddo.com/drfirewater79/

sarlona -Hacknslash, Yadidnt, Healsor, Mrbig, Pyraphillia, Archeroffate, Favoredone, Madstoned, Jabnstab, mafangu, vafanguyou

Orien build guild - ragenslash, kungfusious
Officer of Midnight Guardians - Sarlona and DDO gamer since March 2nd 2006 Future SWTOR player ....
for information on joining a SWTOR guild with other DDO players send me a PM

Member of DDOcast Build Guild on Orien

Leader of Crew of the StarshipEnterprise Guild on Sarlona (now excepting new members contact for information)
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Jerry
Member Avatar
The Host Of DDOcast.
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
Thanks everyone involved in Ask the Devs, and thanks for listening and contributing questions. I've finally wrapped up work on the Ask the Devs transcript for Episode 148. Thanks Sympl of the Knights of the Silver Dragon on Thelanis for his transcription.


Transcript available for download HERE.


ASK THE DEVS: 10th EDITION

A Sympl Transcription





From Episode 148 of DDOcast, recorded for December 19th, 2009



Available for free download at DDOcast.com.



Note: If you have a question you would like asked on “Ask the Devs”, please send Jerry Snook an email at ddocast@gmail.com. Please include a name (character name or real name, whatever) in your email.



###



Jerry Snook: Hello, and welcome to the 10th edition of “Ask the Devs” here on DDOCast. Your chance to ask questions and get 'em answered by the developers and community folks and producers and everyone that's involved in the making of Dungeons and Dragons Online. We've got a whole bunch of people from Turbine with me this week and it’s great to have them all on the show. I really do appreciate it and I know all of our listeners do as well. Let's get to the introductions. First up is Tolero, how you doin' Tolero?



Tolero: Not bad, how are you doing?



Jerry: Excellent. Did you guys get a lot of winter weather?



Tolero: Eh, you know we got our first snow and then it kinda got rained out, so...



Jerry: Yeah.



Tolero: It's been chilly, but not bad.



Jerry: I'm looking at a temperature of negative three right now and it's not a whole lot of fun.



Tolero: Yeah, nothing like that here yet.



Jerry: bBut it's always warm in Stormreach. Actually no that's not true...



Tolero: Yeah, that's right.



Jerry: ..you could be in Aussircaex's Valley, but...



Tolero: Well, if you go South in Stormreach you start hitting a lot more ice than where Stormreach proper is. Stormreach proper is far like northeast of the continent.



Jerry: Well, you don't have to wear any heavy coats. You can still get away with your regular armor.



Tolero: Yeah.



Jerry: Also with us is producer Glin. How you doing Glin?



Glin: Doing good, Jerry, thanks.



Jerry: It's always great to have you on the show. I really appreciate it. We have a new person to the “Ask the Devs” collective here and a relatively new designer brought in to DDO. This is

Genasi, how you doing Genasi?



Genasi: I'm doing well, Jerry, thanks.



Jerry: Ah, just to introduce yourself a bit folks, you are a systems designer. Do you design any systems in particular or is it sort of all around?



Genasi: That's correct, I do system(s). And primarily I do work on the hireling system, but I also do a lot of bug fixing and spell creation. You know pretty much anything that needs doing.



Jerry: Oh fantastic. I bet it's a very interesting job.



Genasi: It is, yeah.



Jerry: And , relatively new here, I think someone said maybe within the last couple of months you were brought into the fold here and anything...you want to say 'hi' to the player base?



Genasi: Yeah, basically, hi everybody I'm glad to be working on the game, and I look forward to feedback from people and to improve anything I can.



Jerry: Oh, fantastic, thank you for being on the show.



Genasi: No problem.



Jerry: Also with us is design director, MadFloyd. How you doing?



MadFloyd: I'm doing great Jerry, how about yourself?



Jerry: Doing very good. Anything new I guess in the game world for you. We were talking off the air a little earlier – I've been playing some new Super Mario Wii, of course in addition to all this great DDO stuff. You got any big games you've been playing?



MadFloyd: I've got a few games that are still shrink-wrapped that I haven't even broke the seal on yet because believe it or not I've been playing DDO mostly.



Jerry: Yes, well I've been playing as much DDO as I can as well. Finally with us is content designer Knockback. How you doing Knockback?



Knockback: Good, Jerry. Long time listener, first time caller.



Jerry: Oh, fantastic. Yeah, I wasn't sure if you'd been on “Ask the Devs” before or not, so, but no and this is a new one.



Knockback: Yep. My maiden voyage.



Jerry: Also, we should note, that this is going out the weekend before the big Christmas holiday and actually just a couple of days, well actually tomorrow, I think, with the release of Update 2.



Tolero: Yep



Jerry: So, this is being recorded before Update 2 goes live. I just wanted to wish you guys all the best of luck in getting that Update out there and the new Dreaming Dark stuff is fantastic.



(Various): Thanks.



?: Cool.



Tolero: Thanks.



Glin: Yeah, in fact, people will be able to enjoy it because by the time that this is out you're going to have a little XP boost and some other holiday promotions going for the next few weeks.



Jerry: Cool.



Glin: Half of them will be already mailed out to everybody but there's a few more coming out over the holiday, through the end of the year as well. So it's a pretty exciting time to be online. I hope some people have some time off.



Jerry: Yeah, absolutely, it's always tough on the holidays, you know. Especially that week of Christmas. A lot of people just aren't at their computers, but you can play on a laptop and you can be at home too. There will be lots of people playing, I'm sure. Let's get to the questions.



First question comes from JackLee7 from Khyber. He asks about new rituals. He says:



“We have a seldom used Adamantine Ritual. Is it possible to add other metals as well? Cold Iron, Silver, Mithril, or even the woods. +5 Plate is just +5 Plate, but if you can add a Mithril ritual to it, then it becomes more useful. This is a phenomenal +3 holy Khopesh of Greater Evil Outsider Bane, but it would be much better if it was silver. What's the likelihood of making that wooden shield glass instead so those Rusties can't eat it?”



Genasi: Ok, I can actually take this one. Basically, I'm going to start off by saying we do have rituals, at least that can be done on the epic item customization system that have DR bypassing effects. So you can get a weapon customized that it can bypass the DR of enemies that have, say, resistance that can be bypassed by Adamantine or Cold Iron, Silver, etcetera. It won't give you the other properties of these metals but it will bypass enemy DR.



Jerry: Cool.



Genasi: So we do have that. In terms of being able to “mithrilize” a piece of equipment for instance...we don't have plans for this yet, unfortunately.



Jerry: Aww...



Genasi: Mostly I think due to balancing issues. Mithril's a very coveted metal.



Jerry: It sure is.



Genasi: For obvious reasons and this is something we don't have plans for right now, but I will say we're always considering adding more rituals and expanding the Stone of Change item modification systems – so you never know what you might see.



Jerry: Well, you know one possibility where I could see that kind of adding mithril might be possible would be a situation where you like, maybe, the skin of the armor very much especially like say in some full plate but it doesn't have an item maybe you could “crunch” a set of mithril full plate into it or something so that you would essentially already be having one and destroying one in the process. That might be kind of something to...that might work.



Genasi: Quite, quite possibly, yeah. I guess we'll see.



Jerry: Yeah. Ah, anyway, yeah, just speculating here. Uh, thanks for that, let's move on to the next question:



“Why not implement, and I think he means raid completions, in the adventure compendium? We already see the favor, etcetera. This way there's no need to always check with the command line.”



This question comes from Korset.



Glin: Yeah, we have a few things in the UI that we want to be changing over the next few updates. I think that just kind of touches on some of the backend commands that we've had in-game for a while that we don't really have forward-facing...like there's a guild invite option that's in the wack commands that we don't have a UI for, but I think that MadFloyd actually has some ideas for the adventure compendium, do you want to talk about that a little bit?



Jerry: Oh, neat.



MadFloyd: Sure. Yeah, we've had our eye on the adventure compendium for a while now. There's a lot of things we'd like to do to it. It's just a matter of time before we actually, you know, get our hands on it and do a little bit of an over-haul, but raids is a great example.



We'd like to see a lot of different progress information in there and right now it’s kind of limited. I think it can be improved as a tool to really figure out which content that you wanted to do next and so we, uh, hopefully in the near future we'll see a revision there that will be a lot more informative and thorough.



Jerry: You know I know you guys say have at least some web interaction with things like, you know, the DDOStore and that. Maybe there's a way you could kind of have a more interactive kind of compendium where you could figure out where the NPC is. You know especially, I imagine a new player, when you're faced with a quest you know who you're supposed to talk to, but you don't necessarily know where that person is, you know what I mean?



MadFloyd: Exactly.



Jerry: Ah.



MadFloyd: Absolutely agree.



Jerry: Well that's excellent, thank you. Next question, and I know that Samius has been wanting to get this one asked for quite a long time, so I'm glad that we're able to bring it in this weeks show. He writes:



“Can we please have the Practiced Spellcaster feat? Please, please, please? I can make waffles.”



Then there's a second part too, but why don't we get to that next. Do you guys know about the Practiced Spellcaster feat? Any thoughts?



Genasi: Uh, I do actually.



Jerry: Ok.



Genasi: I have, actually, for these two questions have good news and bad news, and unfortunately the bad news comes first on Practiced Spellcaster, which is: We don't have plans to implement it. This is another balancing issue similar to Mithril augmentations. Basically it's just...it's a very powerful feat, for those who aren't familiar with it, it allows you to essentially cast spells from one of your spellcasting classes at a higher level than you actually have levels in that class.



Jerry: Hmm.



Genasi: So if you're a level 9 character, but you only have 5 wizard levels, you could get up to 4 extra wizard “spellcaster” levels even though you only have, you know, 5 levels in wizard.



Jerry: Sure.



Genasi: So right now this is something we think is potentially unbalancing so we don't have plans to do it.



Jerry: Ok, yeah, I can understand that. Second Question here is:



“All the summon monster spells have a much wider range of options than one guy when cast, and at each level there's a range of different monsters of different alignments. (Jerry: I assume he's talking pen and paper here.) I find it very sad that my lawful good cleric summons a hellhound from a moral standpoint and my wizard, soloing in Aussircaex's Valley can't use summon monster VIII to summon 1d3 effreet. Can we get some options at each level? Maybe a good/neutral/evil alignment at each level, or let us summon, say, a certain amount of the level below. Just some options, he writes, for one of the best rules in the pen and paper game that didn't necessarily port over quite as strong.”



Genasi: Ok, so I'll answer this one now, which I have better news about.



Jerry: Ah, good.



Genasi: Summon spells – definitely undergoing some changes in the near future. We are experimenting with extending some of the durations, so for certain ones, we'd like to make them permanent until they are killed. Which I know would be nice. And we'd like to improve some of their behavior and have them basically follow the caster – even if you go someplace unreachable, like up a ladder, which is, you know, an issue right now.



We've also been trying to cure some of the long cooldowns on some of the spells, but basically it's quite possible in the future that we be able to have a selector on some of these spells and you can choose different kinds of monsters or potentially multiple monsters of a certain type as requested here, so it's very possible we'll see some of these changes.



Jerry: Ooh, that’d be great. I love it, thanks.



Glin: Yeah, this is one of those things I think we had kind of hinted at when the hirelings came in about a year ago now, that we would want to start rolling out some of the same, you know, player support/advancement. After we do hirelings that those summon monsters would be next and this is sort of a step in that direction.



Jerry: Yeah, I imagine so. It would make a lot of sense and I think he's right that its a strong kind of core part of the pen and paper game, ya know? That it would be good to bring some of that, maybe, more than it is now, into DDO, so...excellent.



Genasi: Yeah, definitely.



Jerry: Alright, well thanks, let's move on to the next question. This comes from Helthf...Health?...from Aundair, or Health Aundair from Khyber. That's right. He used to be on the Aundair server, name is Health – question is, two-parters, first,



“Do you guys/gals ever plan on letting us change our last name?”



Jerry: And second, any chance that the plat cap could be raised from 4,294,967 to, say, 10 million? <chuckle> I know that both of these have been long requested by quite a few folks out there, so what do ya think, any chance to change the last name, is that possible?



Tolero: The last name thing - it's actually a limitation in the tech so we're – we'll be exploring stuff like that for the future. I don't have any announcements or, you know, dates or anything to give you – but it is something that we have looked at it and there is a reason that it doesn't happen currently but that doesn't mean that it couldn't ever happen in the future.



Jerry: Sure, and what a raise of the plat cap?



Genasi: I actually talked to some of the systems guys about this and, um, unfortunately it doesn't seem likely that we'll be increasing the plat cap any time soon.



Jerry: Ok. I've never had to worry about that one.



Glin: Another limit to that, too. I think that the cap is directly related to – it's 32-bit and if we go higher we have to actually change the code to be 64-bit just for the currency system, just to support the math.



Jerry: Oh, very interesting. Very interesting, I didn't know that.



Glin: But that's a little, just a little technical, you know sidestep. There’s also, you know, we're really not that motivated to change the plat cap because it's a pretty high number. Not that people don't hit it, but it's a pretty small group.



Jerry: Sure. Alright...



Knockback: Spend your money!



Jerry: <chuckles> Give it to me. Yeah, ok, the next question comes from Xiloscient:



“Dear Devs, do you plan on adding a lifetime payment option for DDO, like it is on Lord of the Rings Online?”



Sometimes.



Glin: Yeah I think the answer is we...



Jerry: I don't think you guys offer it that much, do you right now?



Glin: We already did that. You can play for free. That's sort of a short, snarky answer, I guess, but the free option is something that we had planned to do until we ended up changing the business model options – it's actually just not a better option than the ones that are out there. It's possible for a player to kind of customize their own package and buy all the content on the upright. But there's...it's kind of a player preference thing – if they think they are going to play for a short amount of time and play off and on then they're better with the subscriber model. If they want to buy just the content packs, they essentially are getting the VIP services without some of the perks, like early access to content and things like that. But, I don't think that the lifetime subscription was something that was in our overall plans as sort of a “best option” without making the options too confusing – too, too vast.



Jerry: Sure.



Tolero: And I think a lot, you know, with the system right now – you can set up your lifetime account in the way that works for you. If you're the kind of person that doesn't plan on, you know, rolling low-level characters, then you're not really interested in buying those low level packs, necessarily. If you're a person that likes to reincarnate and run lots of different alts, then, maybe you're going to want to buy more adventure packs – it's just whatever amount is comfortable for you. With the LOTRO lifetime – that system's very stringent. It's either all or nothing. You're either, you know, a subscriber or you're lifetime. But even if you're lifetime, every time there's a new expansion pack...



Jerry: Yeah, I was just going to say that...



Tolero: ...you have to buy the new expansion.



Jerry: That's true. You know, there's something to be said though for just having a premium sort of once and done thing. Like, you know, if way back even in 2006 or whatever if you guys had said, you know, 400 bucks, lifetime sub, I probably would have done it. Ya know? And I'd probably do it today if – well, probably not 400, but, ya know, if it was, say, 2-300 bucks or whatever, like you see, I mean...it's kind of a nice option.



Tolero: Well, you can pretty much do that right now. You just go into the Store and just pick the content packs you want and buy them in bulk.



Jerry: That's true. Although you do have to buy them (separately), you see, that's what I'm saying.



Tolero: Well, you still have to...



Jerry: Give you the credit card and hit the little button and then you're done.



Tolero: When you're paying for the lifetime subscription – I don't think people really think about that it is – it's a bundle, basically..



Jerry: yeah, yeah.



Tolero: ...and the only difference between it and the DDOStore is that the DDOStore has ‘you put your items in the basket rather than having it packaged in a little bow.’



Jerry: Do you know what your problem is? Your DDOStore doesn't have a “Buy All” button.



Glin: Yeah.



Tolero: There you go, exactly....



Jerry: We need a “Loot All” button for the DDOStore.



Tolero: ...it doesn't have a loot all button.



<laughter>



Jerry: Nice!



Tolero: It doesn't mean you couldn't, you know, eventually get some different bundles of some kind..but, uh..



Jerry: Yeah.



Tolero: ...you know if you're asking for a “Loot All” button for the Store, you're – that's a little different.



Jerry: Sure, sure. Thanks. Next question comes from Oakheart. He writes:



“Will Searing Heights be given any quests like Cerulean Hills? As I think they're great quests and isn't Searing Heights now the only wilderness area without any quests?” He also writes, “Will more NPC speech be added to the game like the stuff we see in the tutorial? Even for quest chains or raids? I think it's cool.”



Again, that's from Oakheart from Devourer.



Knockback: So, Oakheart has a keen eye. We've been thinking similar things about the Searing Heights, and Keeper and I have been busy adding something to the Searing Heights that you'll see in an upcoming update – a new evil organization will be setting up shop in that area. Coming soon!



Jerry: Neat.



Knockback: When it comes to NPC voice, I think everybody was very pleased with how the voice came out for the tutorial, and I think we would all love to do more of it if we had, you know, the right super-special event or dungeon to do it for.



Jerry: Sure. Yeah, and it also brings a lot of personality, I mean, Jeets Shimis, (I think that's how you pronounce it), is kind of become a bit of a NPC celebrity in the game, in part because of his witty comments and nice dialogue, so it can add a nice element, I think, to things too.



Glin: I think his appearance in the spa in Ataraxia's Haven also gives him a little bit of celebrity status.



Jerry: Ah, that's true, too.



<laughter>



Jerry: Well, very cool...



Knockback: Not to mention his “Bacon Mine”.



Jerry: I love Searing Heights. Oh, sorry, go ahead. His “Bacon Mine”, That's right, that's right! And I love Searing Heights so I very much look forward to any quests you might bring in there. I think it would be pretty neat, or whatever it ends up being.



Next question comes from Dr. Firewater, a very timely one:



“What could you hint,” he says, “what teasers could you hint at about Dreaming Dark? Many of us only play regular Dungeons and Dragons and haven't ventured into Eberron or maybe have just plain never heard of it outside of the announcement. Why should I be excited?



Knockback: Well, for folks who aren't familiar with Eberron, the Dreaming Dark is an organization of creatures from the Plane of Nightmares and long ago they almost conquered all of Eberron, but were defeated in a war with the Giants and you first ran across these guys if you played the Path of Inspiration – the previous content pack. And now, in the Dreaming Dark content module, you get to take the fight back to these creatures, and actually you get to travel to Dal'Quor, the Plane of Nightmares and see what that's all about, up close, yourself.



Jerry: Cool.



Knockback: In terms of the, go ahead...



Jerry: Oh, no, I just..I want to say that I did put together my video preview of the Dreaming Dark on YouTube here, and so I've run these quests a number of times now, and they're very, very cool, too. I think they're kind of like a part two to the Path of Inspiration in some ways.



Knockback: Yeah, it finishes up the Path of Inspiration storyline and also as you know from putting together that video, in the last dungeon you get to do some fun things in the Plane of Dreams...



Jerry: Yeah.



Knockback: ...that you don't necessarily get to do except during Festivult time otherwise.



Jerry: <chuckle> Yeah, very cool stuff, and just a nice adventure pack series, so..but he's right though I don't know a lot of the...



Glin: In addition to the fun stuff that you get to do player-wise, there's the additional things you can do to unlock the suppressed powers. Which are on the items from the first series, so a little bit of expansion on the content that you're getting from that series, which is high level content, but not requiring you to run a raid to get it. So, for those that aren't running raids and are doing regular, you know, small party quests – that's another good series for them.



Jerry: Cool, cool. Alright, let's get to question ten here. This one's from Will. He says:



“I've been doing the Beta and I just jumped into the normal client and it was quite useful – notice this was a bit of an older question – it was quite useful, he writes, to note a lot of the minor UI changes. Overall it's a great set of changes although I wish they were not so strict with DDO Unlimited. In fact, if you wouldn't mind – and that's why I'm including this question here – at the next “Ask the Devs” would you ask them if they would consider giving people a little more AFK time, as we seem to get logged out pretty quickly. Maybe 150 or 200% of the currently allowed AFK time.”



And this is from, uh, he goes by Brightshadow instead of just Will, there. So, Brightshadow, hey. What do you think?



Glin: Well, I'm guessing that this is someone who has experienced either the free player 5 minute timeout and then...



Jerry: Yes.



Glin: ...for people who have made purchases like the Premium players – the ones that get the additional two character slots when they make a purchase – they'll have, I think it's a 10 or 15 minute timeout. I don't recall. But our subscribers are getting an hour. They also get first chance to get into the queue, so that if there are wait times, which has happened on a few weekends actually until we opened up another server a few weeks back, the VIPs will get in through the queue faster and then they have less time to logout. So the reason that it's there is the people who are playing for free have to be in-game and active, otherwise we're going to ask them to leave the server to make room for someone else to come in. So it's really just about the population control.



Jerry: True.



Glin: And those people who are paying customers, well we want to give them the extra perk and as a, you know, a privilege to stay in and to have a little bit more time for that bio break.



Jerry: Still, though, 5 minutes, that's not a whole lot of time. I mean, you know, that IS a bio break and, yeah, I don't know...<chuckle>



Tolero: I mean, you don't even have to...



Jerry: I've never experienced it...



Tolero: If you want to be a Premium user to get to the higher tier of the logout timer, even the smallest point bundle purchase qualifies you in the Premium tier, like so just the first time you do it – you're Premium.



Jerry: Oh, ok. Cool, cool. Well, that's excellent and I think that's about all the time we have for you guys. Anything else about Update 2 or the Dreaming Dark you guys may want to bring up or mention here that we haven't covered yet?



MadFloys: Um, I thought I might mention that, in case anyone was wondering about epic content – because we've...it's a fairly new feature that we've had and people might be wondering why there's no more epic release with this Update, and given that it's a high level content pack, we didn't actually make an Epic version of it. It really didn't seem to make sense, but it's our hope going forward that every Update will have some sort of Epic content so there will always be something for the high level players.



Jerry: Very cool.



MadFloyd: So you can look forward to that in the next few updates.



Knockback: Uh, I'll just toss in that the Dreaming Dark content pack does contain one unusual dungeon, which is a solo only dungeon. So, if you're a high level player who is looking for something to do while you're waiting for your friends to get online – or if you plain just don't like people, then there's now a high level quest for you.



Jerry: Or if you like to see a lot of traps.



?: Exactly.



Jerry: Potentially. You know I didn't want to spoil it too much because – but I guess this isn't going out til Saturday, but I tried it two ways. I tried to barrel my way up through all those traps and then I did it the, you know, much easier and probably more correct way to do it. But I wanted to see if I could do it – and the answer is: Almost, but that last corner, with the...



?: Yeah.



Jerry: ...air boost really kind of gets ya.



Knockback: I will say that the developers in the solo dungeon HIGHLY recommend that monks make use of Abundant Step.



Jerry: <chuckles> Very much.



Knockback: Not because it'll work, but because it's hilarious.



<laughter>



Jerry: Cool.



Tolero: Lump Favored Souls into that, too.



Jerry: Well, that's going to do it with our 10th edition of “Ask the Devs”. Thanks very much for listening and thanks very much for all the Turbine folks for their time and effort to talk to us here this week.



Just a note that if you have a question that you want to ask the developers you should send me an email at DDOCast@gmail.com. Again, that's DDOCast@gmail.com.



If you would, it makes it easier if you just say, put “Ask the Devs” in the title or something. It helps me keep it organized. But not 100% necessary.



You can also ask a question for “Ask the Devs” on the DDOCast forums. I've got a place 'sticky-ed' where you can do that if you want to sign up and do it that way instead, so, let's say our goodbyes.



Tolero, Glin, Genasi, MadFloyd and Knockback, thanks so much for being on the show. Good Luck this week on Update 2, have yourselves a Merry Holiday-Festus-Season Time and we'll see you guys soon.



Glin: Merry Festivult.



Tolero: Merry Festivult.



Knockback: Happy Festivult to all!



Genasi: Merry Festivult, guys.



MadFloyd: Bye-bye.



###



DDOcast is distributed under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial license. Feel free to post any or all of this document on your web site, forums, etc, but please let people know that it came from DDOcast. In terms of the “non-commercial” license, if you aren’t trying to sell this stuff on CD or make an unethical buck off of it, don’t worry about it and distribute this transcript as much as you would like.

– Jerry Snook, host DDOcast

Transcript by Sympl, thanks!



Additional formatting, transcription and title work by Jerry



Published 1/4/10
I now work for Turbine!
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Jerry
Member Avatar
The Host Of DDOcast.
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
Thanks everyone involved in Ask the Devs, and thanks for listening and contributing questions. I've finally wrapped up work on the Ask the Devs transcript for Episode 148. Thanks Sympl of the Knights of the Silver Dragon on Thelanis for his transcription.


Transcript available for download HERE.


ASK THE DEVS: 10th EDITION

A Sympl Transcription





From Episode 148 of DDOcast, recorded for December 19th, 2009



Available for free download at DDOcast.com.



Note: If you have a question you would like asked on “Ask the Devs”, please send Jerry Snook an email at ddocast@gmail.com. Please include a name (character name or real name, whatever) in your email.



###



Jerry Snook: Hello, and welcome to the 10th edition of “Ask the Devs” here on DDOCast. Your chance to ask questions and get 'em answered by the developers and community folks and producers and everyone that's involved in the making of Dungeons and Dragons Online. We've got a whole bunch of people from Turbine with me this week and it’s great to have them all on the show. I really do appreciate it and I know all of our listeners do as well. Let's get to the introductions. First up is Tolero, how you doin' Tolero?



Tolero: Not bad, how are you doing?



Jerry: Excellent. Did you guys get a lot of winter weather?



Tolero: Eh, you know we got our first snow and then it kinda got rained out, so...



Jerry: Yeah.



Tolero: It's been chilly, but not bad.



Jerry: I'm looking at a temperature of negative three right now and it's not a whole lot of fun.



Tolero: Yeah, nothing like that here yet.



Jerry: bBut it's always warm in Stormreach. Actually no that's not true...



Tolero: Yeah, that's right.



Jerry: ..you could be in Aussircaex's Valley, but...



Tolero: Well, if you go South in Stormreach you start hitting a lot more ice than where Stormreach proper is. Stormreach proper is far like northeast of the continent.



Jerry: Well, you don't have to wear any heavy coats. You can still get away with your regular armor.



Tolero: Yeah.



Jerry: Also with us is producer Glin. How you doing Glin?



Glin: Doing good, Jerry, thanks.



Jerry: It's always great to have you on the show. I really appreciate it. We have a new person to the “Ask the Devs” collective here and a relatively new designer brought in to DDO. This is

Genasi, how you doing Genasi?



Genasi: I'm doing well, Jerry, thanks.



Jerry: Ah, just to introduce yourself a bit folks, you are a systems designer. Do you design any systems in particular or is it sort of all around?



Genasi: That's correct, I do system(s). And primarily I do work on the hireling system, but I also do a lot of bug fixing and spell creation. You know pretty much anything that needs doing.



Jerry: Oh fantastic. I bet it's a very interesting job.



Genasi: It is, yeah.



Jerry: And , relatively new here, I think someone said maybe within the last couple of months you were brought into the fold here and anything...you want to say 'hi' to the player base?



Genasi: Yeah, basically, hi everybody I'm glad to be working on the game, and I look forward to feedback from people and to improve anything I can.



Jerry: Oh, fantastic, thank you for being on the show.



Genasi: No problem.



Jerry: Also with us is design director, MadFloyd. How you doing?



MadFloyd: I'm doing great Jerry, how about yourself?



Jerry: Doing very good. Anything new I guess in the game world for you. We were talking off the air a little earlier – I've been playing some new Super Mario Wii, of course in addition to all this great DDO stuff. You got any big games you've been playing?



MadFloyd: I've got a few games that are still shrink-wrapped that I haven't even broke the seal on yet because believe it or not I've been playing DDO mostly.



Jerry: Yes, well I've been playing as much DDO as I can as well. Finally with us is content designer Knockback. How you doing Knockback?



Knockback: Good, Jerry. Long time listener, first time caller.



Jerry: Oh, fantastic. Yeah, I wasn't sure if you'd been on “Ask the Devs” before or not, so, but no and this is a new one.



Knockback: Yep. My maiden voyage.



Jerry: Also, we should note, that this is going out the weekend before the big Christmas holiday and actually just a couple of days, well actually tomorrow, I think, with the release of Update 2.



Tolero: Yep



Jerry: So, this is being recorded before Update 2 goes live. I just wanted to wish you guys all the best of luck in getting that Update out there and the new Dreaming Dark stuff is fantastic.



(Various): Thanks.



?: Cool.



Tolero: Thanks.



Glin: Yeah, in fact, people will be able to enjoy it because by the time that this is out you're going to have a little XP boost and some other holiday promotions going for the next few weeks.



Jerry: Cool.



Glin: Half of them will be already mailed out to everybody but there's a few more coming out over the holiday, through the end of the year as well. So it's a pretty exciting time to be online. I hope some people have some time off.



Jerry: Yeah, absolutely, it's always tough on the holidays, you know. Especially that week of Christmas. A lot of people just aren't at their computers, but you can play on a laptop and you can be at home too. There will be lots of people playing, I'm sure. Let's get to the questions.



First question comes from JackLee7 from Khyber. He asks about new rituals. He says:



“We have a seldom used Adamantine Ritual. Is it possible to add other metals as well? Cold Iron, Silver, Mithril, or even the woods. +5 Plate is just +5 Plate, but if you can add a Mithril ritual to it, then it becomes more useful. This is a phenomenal +3 holy Khopesh of Greater Evil Outsider Bane, but it would be much better if it was silver. What's the likelihood of making that wooden shield glass instead so those Rusties can't eat it?”



Genasi: Ok, I can actually take this one. Basically, I'm going to start off by saying we do have rituals, at least that can be done on the epic item customization system that have DR bypassing effects. So you can get a weapon customized that it can bypass the DR of enemies that have, say, resistance that can be bypassed by Adamantine or Cold Iron, Silver, etcetera. It won't give you the other properties of these metals but it will bypass enemy DR.



Jerry: Cool.



Genasi: So we do have that. In terms of being able to “mithrilize” a piece of equipment for instance...we don't have plans for this yet, unfortunately.



Jerry: Aww...



Genasi: Mostly I think due to balancing issues. Mithril's a very coveted metal.



Jerry: It sure is.



Genasi: For obvious reasons and this is something we don't have plans for right now, but I will say we're always considering adding more rituals and expanding the Stone of Change item modification systems – so you never know what you might see.



Jerry: Well, you know one possibility where I could see that kind of adding mithril might be possible would be a situation where you like, maybe, the skin of the armor very much especially like say in some full plate but it doesn't have an item maybe you could “crunch” a set of mithril full plate into it or something so that you would essentially already be having one and destroying one in the process. That might be kind of something to...that might work.



Genasi: Quite, quite possibly, yeah. I guess we'll see.



Jerry: Yeah. Ah, anyway, yeah, just speculating here. Uh, thanks for that, let's move on to the next question:



“Why not implement, and I think he means raid completions, in the adventure compendium? We already see the favor, etcetera. This way there's no need to always check with the command line.”



This question comes from Korset.



Glin: Yeah, we have a few things in the UI that we want to be changing over the next few updates. I think that just kind of touches on some of the backend commands that we've had in-game for a while that we don't really have forward-facing...like there's a guild invite option that's in the wack commands that we don't have a UI for, but I think that MadFloyd actually has some ideas for the adventure compendium, do you want to talk about that a little bit?



Jerry: Oh, neat.



MadFloyd: Sure. Yeah, we've had our eye on the adventure compendium for a while now. There's a lot of things we'd like to do to it. It's just a matter of time before we actually, you know, get our hands on it and do a little bit of an over-haul, but raids is a great example.



We'd like to see a lot of different progress information in there and right now it’s kind of limited. I think it can be improved as a tool to really figure out which content that you wanted to do next and so we, uh, hopefully in the near future we'll see a revision there that will be a lot more informative and thorough.



Jerry: You know I know you guys say have at least some web interaction with things like, you know, the DDOStore and that. Maybe there's a way you could kind of have a more interactive kind of compendium where you could figure out where the NPC is. You know especially, I imagine a new player, when you're faced with a quest you know who you're supposed to talk to, but you don't necessarily know where that person is, you know what I mean?



MadFloyd: Exactly.



Jerry: Ah.



MadFloyd: Absolutely agree.



Jerry: Well that's excellent, thank you. Next question, and I know that Samius has been wanting to get this one asked for quite a long time, so I'm glad that we're able to bring it in this weeks show. He writes:



“Can we please have the Practiced Spellcaster feat? Please, please, please? I can make waffles.”



Then there's a second part too, but why don't we get to that next. Do you guys know about the Practiced Spellcaster feat? Any thoughts?



Genasi: Uh, I do actually.



Jerry: Ok.



Genasi: I have, actually, for these two questions have good news and bad news, and unfortunately the bad news comes first on Practiced Spellcaster, which is: We don't have plans to implement it. This is another balancing issue similar to Mithril augmentations. Basically it's just...it's a very powerful feat, for those who aren't familiar with it, it allows you to essentially cast spells from one of your spellcasting classes at a higher level than you actually have levels in that class.



Jerry: Hmm.



Genasi: So if you're a level 9 character, but you only have 5 wizard levels, you could get up to 4 extra wizard “spellcaster” levels even though you only have, you know, 5 levels in wizard.



Jerry: Sure.



Genasi: So right now this is something we think is potentially unbalancing so we don't have plans to do it.



Jerry: Ok, yeah, I can understand that. Second Question here is:



“All the summon monster spells have a much wider range of options than one guy when cast, and at each level there's a range of different monsters of different alignments. (Jerry: I assume he's talking pen and paper here.) I find it very sad that my lawful good cleric summons a hellhound from a moral standpoint and my wizard, soloing in Aussircaex's Valley can't use summon monster VIII to summon 1d3 effreet. Can we get some options at each level? Maybe a good/neutral/evil alignment at each level, or let us summon, say, a certain amount of the level below. Just some options, he writes, for one of the best rules in the pen and paper game that didn't necessarily port over quite as strong.”



Genasi: Ok, so I'll answer this one now, which I have better news about.



Jerry: Ah, good.



Genasi: Summon spells – definitely undergoing some changes in the near future. We are experimenting with extending some of the durations, so for certain ones, we'd like to make them permanent until they are killed. Which I know would be nice. And we'd like to improve some of their behavior and have them basically follow the caster – even if you go someplace unreachable, like up a ladder, which is, you know, an issue right now.



We've also been trying to cure some of the long cooldowns on some of the spells, but basically it's quite possible in the future that we be able to have a selector on some of these spells and you can choose different kinds of monsters or potentially multiple monsters of a certain type as requested here, so it's very possible we'll see some of these changes.



Jerry: Ooh, that’d be great. I love it, thanks.



Glin: Yeah, this is one of those things I think we had kind of hinted at when the hirelings came in about a year ago now, that we would want to start rolling out some of the same, you know, player support/advancement. After we do hirelings that those summon monsters would be next and this is sort of a step in that direction.



Jerry: Yeah, I imagine so. It would make a lot of sense and I think he's right that its a strong kind of core part of the pen and paper game, ya know? That it would be good to bring some of that, maybe, more than it is now, into DDO, so...excellent.



Genasi: Yeah, definitely.



Jerry: Alright, well thanks, let's move on to the next question. This comes from Helthf...Health?...from Aundair, or Health Aundair from Khyber. That's right. He used to be on the Aundair server, name is Health – question is, two-parters, first,



“Do you guys/gals ever plan on letting us change our last name?”



Jerry: And second, any chance that the plat cap could be raised from 4,294,967 to, say, 10 million? <chuckle> I know that both of these have been long requested by quite a few folks out there, so what do ya think, any chance to change the last name, is that possible?



Tolero: The last name thing - it's actually a limitation in the tech so we're – we'll be exploring stuff like that for the future. I don't have any announcements or, you know, dates or anything to give you – but it is something that we have looked at it and there is a reason that it doesn't happen currently but that doesn't mean that it couldn't ever happen in the future.



Jerry: Sure, and what a raise of the plat cap?



Genasi: I actually talked to some of the systems guys about this and, um, unfortunately it doesn't seem likely that we'll be increasing the plat cap any time soon.



Jerry: Ok. I've never had to worry about that one.



Glin: Another limit to that, too. I think that the cap is directly related to – it's 32-bit and if we go higher we have to actually change the code to be 64-bit just for the currency system, just to support the math.



Jerry: Oh, very interesting. Very interesting, I didn't know that.



Glin: But that's a little, just a little technical, you know sidestep. There’s also, you know, we're really not that motivated to change the plat cap because it's a pretty high number. Not that people don't hit it, but it's a pretty small group.



Jerry: Sure. Alright...



Knockback: Spend your money!



Jerry: <chuckles> Give it to me. Yeah, ok, the next question comes from Xiloscient:



“Dear Devs, do you plan on adding a lifetime payment option for DDO, like it is on Lord of the Rings Online?”



Sometimes.



Glin: Yeah I think the answer is we...



Jerry: I don't think you guys offer it that much, do you right now?



Glin: We already did that. You can play for free. That's sort of a short, snarky answer, I guess, but the free option is something that we had planned to do until we ended up changing the business model options – it's actually just not a better option than the ones that are out there. It's possible for a player to kind of customize their own package and buy all the content on the upright. But there's...it's kind of a player preference thing – if they think they are going to play for a short amount of time and play off and on then they're better with the subscriber model. If they want to buy just the content packs, they essentially are getting the VIP services without some of the perks, like early access to content and things like that. But, I don't think that the lifetime subscription was something that was in our overall plans as sort of a “best option” without making the options too confusing – too, too vast.



Jerry: Sure.



Tolero: And I think a lot, you know, with the system right now – you can set up your lifetime account in the way that works for you. If you're the kind of person that doesn't plan on, you know, rolling low-level characters, then you're not really interested in buying those low level packs, necessarily. If you're a person that likes to reincarnate and run lots of different alts, then, maybe you're going to want to buy more adventure packs – it's just whatever amount is comfortable for you. With the LOTRO lifetime – that system's very stringent. It's either all or nothing. You're either, you know, a subscriber or you're lifetime. But even if you're lifetime, every time there's a new expansion pack...



Jerry: Yeah, I was just going to say that...



Tolero: ...you have to buy the new expansion.



Jerry: That's true. You know, there's something to be said though for just having a premium sort of once and done thing. Like, you know, if way back even in 2006 or whatever if you guys had said, you know, 400 bucks, lifetime sub, I probably would have done it. Ya know? And I'd probably do it today if – well, probably not 400, but, ya know, if it was, say, 2-300 bucks or whatever, like you see, I mean...it's kind of a nice option.



Tolero: Well, you can pretty much do that right now. You just go into the Store and just pick the content packs you want and buy them in bulk.



Jerry: That's true. Although you do have to buy them (separately), you see, that's what I'm saying.



Tolero: Well, you still have to...



Jerry: Give you the credit card and hit the little button and then you're done.



Tolero: When you're paying for the lifetime subscription – I don't think people really think about that it is – it's a bundle, basically..



Jerry: yeah, yeah.



Tolero: ...and the only difference between it and the DDOStore is that the DDOStore has ‘you put your items in the basket rather than having it packaged in a little bow.’



Jerry: Do you know what your problem is? Your DDOStore doesn't have a “Buy All” button.



Glin: Yeah.



Tolero: There you go, exactly....



Jerry: We need a “Loot All” button for the DDOStore.



Tolero: ...it doesn't have a loot all button.



<laughter>



Jerry: Nice!



Tolero: It doesn't mean you couldn't, you know, eventually get some different bundles of some kind..but, uh..



Jerry: Yeah.



Tolero: ...you know if you're asking for a “Loot All” button for the Store, you're – that's a little different.



Jerry: Sure, sure. Thanks. Next question comes from Oakheart. He writes:



“Will Searing Heights be given any quests like Cerulean Hills? As I think they're great quests and isn't Searing Heights now the only wilderness area without any quests?” He also writes, “Will more NPC speech be added to the game like the stuff we see in the tutorial? Even for quest chains or raids? I think it's cool.”



Again, that's from Oakheart from Devourer.



Knockback: So, Oakheart has a keen eye. We've been thinking similar things about the Searing Heights, and Keeper and I have been busy adding something to the Searing Heights that you'll see in an upcoming update – a new evil organization will be setting up shop in that area. Coming soon!



Jerry: Neat.



Knockback: When it comes to NPC voice, I think everybody was very pleased with how the voice came out for the tutorial, and I think we would all love to do more of it if we had, you know, the right super-special event or dungeon to do it for.



Jerry: Sure. Yeah, and it also brings a lot of personality, I mean, Jeets Shimis, (I think that's how you pronounce it), is kind of become a bit of a NPC celebrity in the game, in part because of his witty comments and nice dialogue, so it can add a nice element, I think, to things too.



Glin: I think his appearance in the spa in Ataraxia's Haven also gives him a little bit of celebrity status.



Jerry: Ah, that's true, too.



<laughter>



Jerry: Well, very cool...



Knockback: Not to mention his “Bacon Mine”.



Jerry: I love Searing Heights. Oh, sorry, go ahead. His “Bacon Mine”, That's right, that's right! And I love Searing Heights so I very much look forward to any quests you might bring in there. I think it would be pretty neat, or whatever it ends up being.



Next question comes from Dr. Firewater, a very timely one:



“What could you hint,” he says, “what teasers could you hint at about Dreaming Dark? Many of us only play regular Dungeons and Dragons and haven't ventured into Eberron or maybe have just plain never heard of it outside of the announcement. Why should I be excited?



Knockback: Well, for folks who aren't familiar with Eberron, the Dreaming Dark is an organization of creatures from the Plane of Nightmares and long ago they almost conquered all of Eberron, but were defeated in a war with the Giants and you first ran across these guys if you played the Path of Inspiration – the previous content pack. And now, in the Dreaming Dark content module, you get to take the fight back to these creatures, and actually you get to travel to Dal'Quor, the Plane of Nightmares and see what that's all about, up close, yourself.



Jerry: Cool.



Knockback: In terms of the, go ahead...



Jerry: Oh, no, I just..I want to say that I did put together my video preview of the Dreaming Dark on YouTube here, and so I've run these quests a number of times now, and they're very, very cool, too. I think they're kind of like a part two to the Path of Inspiration in some ways.



Knockback: Yeah, it finishes up the Path of Inspiration storyline and also as you know from putting together that video, in the last dungeon you get to do some fun things in the Plane of Dreams...



Jerry: Yeah.



Knockback: ...that you don't necessarily get to do except during Festivult time otherwise.



Jerry: <chuckle> Yeah, very cool stuff, and just a nice adventure pack series, so..but he's right though I don't know a lot of the...



Glin: In addition to the fun stuff that you get to do player-wise, there's the additional things you can do to unlock the suppressed powers. Which are on the items from the first series, so a little bit of expansion on the content that you're getting from that series, which is high level content, but not requiring you to run a raid to get it. So, for those that aren't running raids and are doing regular, you know, small party quests – that's another good series for them.



Jerry: Cool, cool. Alright, let's get to question ten here. This one's from Will. He says:



“I've been doing the Beta and I just jumped into the normal client and it was quite useful – notice this was a bit of an older question – it was quite useful, he writes, to note a lot of the minor UI changes. Overall it's a great set of changes although I wish they were not so strict with DDO Unlimited. In fact, if you wouldn't mind – and that's why I'm including this question here – at the next “Ask the Devs” would you ask them if they would consider giving people a little more AFK time, as we seem to get logged out pretty quickly. Maybe 150 or 200% of the currently allowed AFK time.”



And this is from, uh, he goes by Brightshadow instead of just Will, there. So, Brightshadow, hey. What do you think?



Glin: Well, I'm guessing that this is someone who has experienced either the free player 5 minute timeout and then...



Jerry: Yes.



Glin: ...for people who have made purchases like the Premium players – the ones that get the additional two character slots when they make a purchase – they'll have, I think it's a 10 or 15 minute timeout. I don't recall. But our subscribers are getting an hour. They also get first chance to get into the queue, so that if there are wait times, which has happened on a few weekends actually until we opened up another server a few weeks back, the VIPs will get in through the queue faster and then they have less time to logout. So the reason that it's there is the people who are playing for free have to be in-game and active, otherwise we're going to ask them to leave the server to make room for someone else to come in. So it's really just about the population control.



Jerry: True.



Glin: And those people who are paying customers, well we want to give them the extra perk and as a, you know, a privilege to stay in and to have a little bit more time for that bio break.



Jerry: Still, though, 5 minutes, that's not a whole lot of time. I mean, you know, that IS a bio break and, yeah, I don't know...<chuckle>



Tolero: I mean, you don't even have to...



Jerry: I've never experienced it...



Tolero: If you want to be a Premium user to get to the higher tier of the logout timer, even the smallest point bundle purchase qualifies you in the Premium tier, like so just the first time you do it – you're Premium.



Jerry: Oh, ok. Cool, cool. Well, that's excellent and I think that's about all the time we have for you guys. Anything else about Update 2 or the Dreaming Dark you guys may want to bring up or mention here that we haven't covered yet?



MadFloys: Um, I thought I might mention that, in case anyone was wondering about epic content – because we've...it's a fairly new feature that we've had and people might be wondering why there's no more epic release with this Update, and given that it's a high level content pack, we didn't actually make an Epic version of it. It really didn't seem to make sense, but it's our hope going forward that every Update will have some sort of Epic content so there will always be something for the high level players.



Jerry: Very cool.



MadFloyd: So you can look forward to that in the next few updates.



Knockback: Uh, I'll just toss in that the Dreaming Dark content pack does contain one unusual dungeon, which is a solo only dungeon. So, if you're a high level player who is looking for something to do while you're waiting for your friends to get online – or if you plain just don't like people, then there's now a high level quest for you.



Jerry: Or if you like to see a lot of traps.



?: Exactly.



Jerry: Potentially. You know I didn't want to spoil it too much because – but I guess this isn't going out til Saturday, but I tried it two ways. I tried to barrel my way up through all those traps and then I did it the, you know, much easier and probably more correct way to do it. But I wanted to see if I could do it – and the answer is: Almost, but that last corner, with the...



?: Yeah.



Jerry: ...air boost really kind of gets ya.



Knockback: I will say that the developers in the solo dungeon HIGHLY recommend that monks make use of Abundant Step.



Jerry: <chuckles> Very much.



Knockback: Not because it'll work, but because it's hilarious.



<laughter>



Jerry: Cool.



Tolero: Lump Favored Souls into that, too.



Jerry: Well, that's going to do it with our 10th edition of “Ask the Devs”. Thanks very much for listening and thanks very much for all the Turbine folks for their time and effort to talk to us here this week.



Just a note that if you have a question that you want to ask the developers you should send me an email at DDOCast@gmail.com. Again, that's DDOCast@gmail.com.



If you would, it makes it easier if you just say, put “Ask the Devs” in the title or something. It helps me keep it organized. But not 100% necessary.



You can also ask a question for “Ask the Devs” on the DDOCast forums. I've got a place 'sticky-ed' where you can do that if you want to sign up and do it that way instead, so, let's say our goodbyes.



Tolero, Glin, Genasi, MadFloyd and Knockback, thanks so much for being on the show. Good Luck this week on Update 2, have yourselves a Merry Holiday-Festus-Season Time and we'll see you guys soon.



Glin: Merry Festivult.



Tolero: Merry Festivult.



Knockback: Happy Festivult to all!



Genasi: Merry Festivult, guys.



MadFloyd: Bye-bye.



###



DDOcast is distributed under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial license. Feel free to post any or all of this document on your web site, forums, etc, but please let people know that it came from DDOcast. In terms of the “non-commercial” license, if you aren’t trying to sell this stuff on CD or make an unethical buck off of it, don’t worry about it and distribute this transcript as much as you would like.

– Jerry Snook, host DDOcast

Transcript by Sympl, thanks!



Additional formatting, transcription and title work by Jerry



Published 1/4/10
I now work for Turbine!
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
« Previous Topic · General Talk. · Next Topic »
Add Reply