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Comments: 178 +- Games: Dungeons & Dragons Online Goes Free-To-Play on Wednesday June 10 2009, @06:06AM
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Dungeons & Dragons Online developer Turbine has announced that they'll be launching a new version of the game, called Eberron Unlimited, which makes it free to play, with the option of using micro-transactions to buy certain items and customize characters. Players will also be able to earn points through normal play that they can spend in the DDO Store. There's an additional option to pay a normal subscription fee for priority access to servers, a monthly allotment of points for the store, and extra character slots. Further details and a sign-up for the beta are available at the game's website.
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Free-To-Play Switch Going Well For D&D Online 201 comments
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They let anyone on these days... (Score:2, Insightful)
When people can play for free, there's little incentive not to be a griefer or otherwise annoying if that's what you like. Create a new anonymous account and spam Chuck Norris jokes, steal kills, etc.
Having just pay-for-play sets a threshold. You'll still have annoying players, but not as many. I'd want a "Play at +1, ignore Anonymous Cowards" option for the "VIP" (for-pay) accounts.
Re:They let anyone on these days... (Score:5, Interesting)
Having just pay-for-play sets a threshold. You'll still have annoying players, but not as many. I'd want a "Play at +1, ignore Anonymous Cowards" option for the "VIP" (for-pay) accounts.
I'm a dick to people in WoW only because it's the last fun thing to do. Raiding? PVP? I'd rather just grief. Even with pay-to-play, you spend your $15 a month to play how you want, I spend mine to camp people, troll the realm forums, and do old content with friends.
I, of course, do not ninja loot like some people or interfere with a guilds progression. That's where I draw the line.
Parent
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I think you're being honest, which means this isn't a troll *comment*. /Dot really needs a lateral 0-point Scary mod.
Re:They let anyone on these days... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? There's absolutely nothing wrong with what he does. Death in wow has zero penalties, and it's absolutely within the game mechanics to grief people like he does. Maybe you need a -1 reality check (aka overrated) mod?
Eve allows tons of griefing, as does darkfall, as does any game with PVP, especially if you're on a PVP server. The victims that are bad players always cry out like no other, which feeds and entertains those who choose to grief. If you choose to carebear all day then do so, that's your $15.
Parent
Re:They let anyone on these days... (Score:4, Insightful)
Death in wow has zero penalties...
There's no penalty only if your time is worthless. Say you were on your way somewhere and then BAM you're a ghost 10 minutes from your corpse. Run back to your corpse and BAM you're a ghost for 10 more minutes. You get the idea.
Parent
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If a another player can attack you in the wild then you have either engaged yourself in PvP recently, or willingly rolled on a PvP server. In either event it was a choice on gameplay style that you made. Personally, I LOATHE corpse runs like you mention because I have limited time and don't want to spend time in the ghost world due to griefers. And that's why I rolled on a *PvE* server and don't throw pot shots and flagged players. Problem solved.
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If the one being camped (for more than a few kills), this is the time that you contact your fellow guild mates and reverse the camping situation.
If the one camping, this is the time you think "have they called in reinforcements yet?" or "can I kill them one more time?"
As you said further on in your comment, a PvE server offers a place to play where you don't have to participate in PvP activities. Blizzard offers an environment for different play sty
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Re:They let anyone on these days... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also an interesting response because it's the same knee-jerk defense of WoW PvP I've read in many other forums. If you don't like it, go away. If that's become such a quick response to anything that seems even remotely to be an attack on PvP, maybe that says something about how PvP is broken in WoW. Can you play on a PvP server without griefing or being griefed? What if all your friends are griefers and refuse to roll on anything but a PvP server? Is there any point to playing on a PvP server besides being able to one day grief others? Do people even distinguish between griefing and PvP anymore or is it basically, "You're on a PvP server. Expect PvP all day, every day. Oh and by the way PvP means that as you're out questing you'll encounter random groups of PvP equipped max level players who will kill you and camp your corpse."
And no, I don't play WoW so I don't need advice on what server to roll on. I'm just a bit disappointed in what PvP has come to be defined as. I tell my WoW playing friends that when I want to PvP I'll load up DoD:S or TF2. That's consensual PvP.
Parent
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"You're on a PvP server. Expect PvP all day, every day. Oh and by the way PvP means that as you're out questing you'll encounter random groups of PvP equipped max level players who will kill you and camp your corpse."
Yes that is exactly how it is. If you didn't want to play where you were always in constant danger of being killed you shouldn't play on the server that is set up with exactly those dynamics.
PvPer's are quick to defend (Score:5, Insightful)
being an asshole to other players. Something about playing PvP seems to bring out the desire to be an anonymous fuckwad towards other people. Probably because there are no consequences, and partially because it grants the illusion of power to the PvPer, even if it is only the power to annoy.
Its a shame too, because I have enjoyed PvP in the past in games where at least some people had a sense of sportsmanship (early DAOC for instance), but that sort of player seems to have disappeared, buried in the mass of total asshats that the hobby throws up like so much putrid trash.
I no longer PvP in any game because I just don't want to be bothered spending my time associating with people whom if I met them in real life and they talked and acted the way they do to me in game, I most likely would kick them in the nuts repeatedly.
It is possible to PvP and not grief, it is possible to PvP and if you win, not Tbag or asshat your enemy, it is possible to lose without whining. If you join a PvP server you know you are facing the worst of online humanity, you can expect conduct that wouldn't be tolerated in grade school by people who don't seem to have passed grade school. At best they are a loathesome pile of shit, obscuring the few decent players I have met and in a lot of cases they aren't even very good.
I think the answer is to stop PvPing. Fuck those guys, if they can't play nice, don't play. Its a waste of time. I enjoy other aspects of games quite happily and always have. I just gave up on PvPing because the quality of people I had to associate with wasn't worth the bother. Plus the gameplay gets kind of stagnant eventually as well.
Queue the PvPers responding to diss me and call me a carebear etc.
Parent
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"What if all your friends are griefers "
get new friends.
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Wedgies in high school had zero penalties. Why don't you pay me $15 a month and I'll come over and give you one for old times sake.
It actually did. The person doing it would get in trouble with the school. You're comparing apples to oranges, sir.
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I dunno, as an admitted griefer, you're still someone I'd hope that Blizzard bans from the game entirely.
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I thinks its more the case that he was one of the fat nerdy kids bullied at school, and now he decided to bully other people to build up his self-image, but lacks the cojones to do it in person. Its his shining moment to attempt to be an alpha male, and grab some sense of power in a world that he generally perceives himself to be completely powerless in.
Its like all the moronic trolls of the internet, basically. I doubt even 1% of them were abused as children, or such. Their just social rejects who were
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Who do you think posts all those goatse links?
No, you see, that's how you get banned. The trick is to just troll and to slowly get close to the line of being suspended from the game or forums without crossing it.
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How big is Runes of Magic? Sure, it's completely possible to have a civil player-base, but it's easier (and more likely) when it's a small devoted base as opposed to a large sprawling population of players.
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Ha, I met way more griefers on WoW than I ever did on Guild Wars. And if you ever want to visit griefer central, try out EVE sometime (also with a monthly charge).
It all comes down to the maturity of the crowd, and immature teenagers and assholes don't have any problem affording $15 a month.
Re:They let anyone on these days... (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you ever want to visit griefer central, try out EVE sometime (also with a monthly charge).
EVE is a game that revolves around griefing. Griefers camp strategic points in space. Anti-griefers hunt the griefers. Industrialists supply both sides with new ships and supplies. Occasionally there are large scale lagfests where groups of people destroy lots and lots of each other's ships to compete for griefing rights in a certain area of space.
The reason why this is so successful is because, as a post a few up from here notes, what is there left to do? It's just not worthwhile for a company to write that much content for people paying only $15 a month. And in a virtual world like that of EVE, PvP tends to evolve into griefing instead of even matchups or other formal PvP.
Parent
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or other formal PvP.
You mean instanced, carebear PvP like the WoW battlegrounds?
Re:They let anyone on these days... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Stop asking for the other kind of free (Score:2, Insightful)
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Not if you do it right, require a signed stack and other DRM-like tricks and your at least as safe as a closed source game. Open source means you can't hide your server side deficiencies (trusting the client) behind client side code, but at the end of the day between decompiers are reverse engineers the bulk of your code will be out there anyway. TBH whatever you do your going to get cheats and hackers (although speed hacks are down to poor server-side code), I'm an FPS guy and whether your paying HL(w/ VAC
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require a signed stack and other DRM-like tricks
Which is simply impossible to do with open source.
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It's tricky but i fail to see how getting major distros to sign their openGL/audio stacks, then requiring the clients to verify they are using a valid stack, is impossible? And you can also verify the client is valid by using a small 3rd party executable, like closed source games do. yeah its not perfect as you either need to close some of the source (the verifying software) or just accept that no protection is perfect and hopefully raise the bar above that of HL/whatever game cheats love playing at the mom
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It's tricky but i fail to see how getting major distros to sign their openGL/audio stacks, then requiring the clients to verify they are using a valid stack, is impossible?
Because if the client is open source, you just dyke out those checks.
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Only if you are an idiot. The first rule of client-server programming is don't trust the client. Don't give the client any more data than it needs, validate all messages from the client. Things like wall hacks only work because the server is providing the client with too much information. Speed hacks only work because the server is allowing the client to move more than the correct amount (i.e. not validating the input). As for tripling the size of on-screen enemies and aimbots; if your game depends so much on your ability to click accurately on small things to be fun, the odds are that it isn't.
No, wallhacks work because it is very expensive to perform thorough visibility checks on every single frame of the game(See Potentially visible set [wikipedia.org] on Wikipedia). The idea is that a precalculated set of areas have information as to which other areas are potentially visible from that particular area. This means that an area spanning a corridor would have visibility into adjacent corridors, and thus, you could 'see' around corners with translucent walls.
Pushing more information towards the client is an optimi
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MMO's are in-general spartan as far as information passed back-and-forth because if it was any different, the servers would need a lot more bandwidth. This is also true for multi-player FPS's.
Because of this, it is imperative that they DO hide the weaknesses behind a veil of secracy. A good example of this is Diablo II, where the entire leve
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Things like wall hacks only work because the server is providing the client with too much information
Games might suck a little without sound - and it would be a bit much having to render all the sound on the server.
if your game depends so much on your ability to click accurately on small things to be fun, the odds are that it isn't.
I don't know, I've had a lot of fun playing games like Counter-Strike where if you're good you can take someone out with one shot to the head (you can also do spray and pray and it's still fun and feasible with the right tactics, but you're more likely to die than if you take people out with razor-like precision). Games where you repeatedly have to pummel hundreds of shots into anywhere on a pla
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Y'all ever play a MMORPG? They're Heroism By Spreadsheet; "aimbot" is a non sequitur.
Speedhacks, gosh, since WOW is plagued by them [google.com], I guess it must be because the client is open source, rather than because some spazz dev decided that it was a good idea to have the server trust the client, right?
Any popular game is going to have its client, or client protocol, compromised. There'
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So closed source games are free of said hacks? No? Well, I be damned!
There's this thing - the "server". It can do things like "hack prevention" and "sanity checks". Who's to say that the only contribution to open source would be client-side hacks and not server-side anti-hack improvements?
I'm not argueing for open source games, but saying there will be hacks because of open source is just as dumb as saying an open source encryption tool is less secure than closed source security-by-obscurity implementation.
There are limits to what server-side checking can do. When your MMO starts getting overrun by people with autoclickers, bots and other annoyances that can be done client-side, no amount of server-side checking can help you.
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You can validate who is on the other end just fine (accounts, encryption keys, etc), what you can't check is what they are doing (cheating, displaying information sent to then in unintended ways or using scripts to generate input faster than a human could).
Microtransactions suck (Score:3, Funny)
Whos going to play it? (Score:2)
I thought they just burned all their fans using copyright law, aren't we supposed to hate these guys ATM?
I'd love to see the IP free up.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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They Made D&D Online? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, it must have really sucked to fly under my radar...
Anyway, I should contribute something to the discussion.
The whole point why successful dating services (yeah who would have throught MMOs and Dating Services had something in common) charge is to create a cost-of-entry that separates serious participants from the rest of the population.
By making a game free-to-play you are inviting disaster as many /.'ers have pointed out.
In fact game studios would do far better to charge MORE for certain options.
I know at least 400 VN board members that pleaded with Mythic for a 21+ and over server for DAOC. We were so damn sick of the 10 year olds playing...
Same with the hard core role players. They were willing to shell out $20 a month for a hard core, RPG server.
I'd wager you would also get some people to kick in $5 extra a month for say 40 and older servers also for people that still remember how to spell OKAY.
Seriously free-to-play means every idiot and their cousin can get on. Remember how pissed the techie crowd was with AOL and COMPUSERV for bring ever no-nothing to the Internet?
Seriously look what happened to WoW when they started their free trial program. First week alone on Tichndrius there where 200+ people spamming Gold ads in Ironforge forever renaming it LAGFORGE and SPAMFORGE.
Even after the tweaks to shut up folks on trial accounts you still had to contend with starting an alt and have 100 level 1 bots camping every spawn with some level 40 (at the time) telling you that if you want to kill stuff you had to play him 10 gold. (We had a big problem with Cross Realm extortionists back then...)
Seriously D&D Online must have sucked pretty bad for flying this low under the radar and making a free-to-play version sounds like a really really bad idea...
But hey I love being proven wrong. It happens once in a while and I find it refreshing.
Re:They Made D&D Online? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know at least 400 VN board members that pleaded with Mythic for a 21+ and over server for DAOC. We were so damn sick of the 10 year olds playing...
The problem is that half the "10 year olds" are actually 30 and just act 10. Age restricted servers don't block stupid.
Parent
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True but as a barrier of entry a 10 year old will have a hard time justifying the extra cost to mom and dad.
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Yeah...Age of Conan supposedly had an older player base, but people still seemed to think "mature" meant "Be a dick all the time. Also, and nipples and blood."
The most disconcerting reality checks came in groups where based on the player's chat and performance I'm -positive- they're a kid...Then they say they need to go afk "cuz my kid's crying."
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Also, and nipples and blood.
O_o Eeeeewww!
The most disconcerting reality checks came in groups where based on the player's chat and performance I'm -positive- they're a kid...Then they say they need to go afk "cuz my kid's crying."
The tragedy of teenage pregnancy strikes reaches even into the online world!
But seriously, it's funny how some of my best WoW-only friends have been actually kids in the 10-15 range. Sure they think Chuck Norris jokes are hilarious no matter how many times you spam chat with them,
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I'd wager you would also get some people to kick in $5 extra a month for, say, 40-and-older servers, and for people who still remember how to spell O.K..
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O.K., as far as I know, is the older form, dating for 1839; whereas "okay" dates from the 1890s. The initialism "O.K." seems to have been replaced by the "OK" form in the 1970s, even though it's still pronounced as an initialism, rather than an acronym.
Also, "know-nothing", "every" and "bringing".
Better than the beta? (Score:2)
Has the game improved since the beta tests? I didn't like it much during beta compared to WoW.