This is the first fruit of my “Ask me things” post. My thanks to JB for giving me something to write about! He asked:
Getting the most out of a free MMO, as I understand it there is stuff you can do in DDO to unlock stuff for free/get bonus turbine points etc. Would be interesting to see how much of the game you can actually get without spending any money.
I should mention that this only applies to the US DDO servers run by Turbine. The European ones run by Codemasters are still subscription only, but European players have no problem signing up for a US DDO account.
Playing for free in DDO is perfectly possible. The basic classes and the free content adventures would probably be sufficient for a lot of casual gamers. While it is possible to get Turbine points through play, most people would find it a bit too labour intensive to get more than an adventure pack or twos worth, but again, that would probably be sufficient for a lot of players.
There are two separate tracks upon which you can earn Turbine points. One is per server, and one is per character. Both are dependant of the Favor system.
What is favor?
Every adventure in DDO gains you favour with one of the city’s factions. How much favor you have from a given adventure depends on whether you have completed it on normal, hard, or elite difficulty. For instance, you might have an adventure which rewards favor with the Silver Flame, and it would give you 3 points if you’d completed it on normal, 6 on hard, or 9 on elite. The amount of favor you have from it is based on the highest level difficulty you have ever completed it on. This is a once only reward. You don’t get more favor for repeating the adventure, once you’ve done it on elite. As any given character has a finite number of adventures available to them, they also have a finite amount of possible favor.
Your Adventure Compendium tracks which adventures you have completed at which difficulty, and how much favor you have gained from them. Longer adventures are usually worth more favor than shorter ones.
DDO's Adventure Compendium
The patron tab shows you how much favor you have with particular factions, and your total earned favor. Filling a favor bar will result in some sort of reward or bonus. Most notably, getting 400 total favor will unlock the Drow race for you on that server. This is not too difficult, and I would suggest this method instead of buying the Drow race with your precious Turbine points.
DDO's Patron window
The Per-Character path to Turbine Points
Per character, you simply get 25 Turbine points for every 100 favor you earn. If you only use the free content, there are currently 1001 points worth of favor available, worth a potential 250 Turbine points.
The Per-Server path to Turbine Points
On each server, the first time one of your characters reaches a certain favor threshold, you receive Turbine points. The thresholds are as follows:
Favor
Turbine Points
5
50
25
25
50
25
500
50
1000
100
2000
100
3000
100
This is where the quick and easy points are. You only need 5 favor to get a decent wallop of 50 Turbine points. You can get 5 favor simply by working through the tutorial, up to the the adventure under the tavern, “The Collaborator”. Doable in about 20 minutes, I’d say, and you can do this once on every single server. There are 7 servers, giving you 350 points if you did this on each one. You could, if so inclined, go for 25 favor on each server, for another 175 points. It can be a good opportunity to try out a class or build before unleashing it on your main server.
When you have your points, you then have a choice as to what to use them on. If you’re determined not to spend any money, then you should probably save them for adventure packs. The Turbine shop runs a lot of sales and special deals, and you can save some points by picking up adventures when they are discounted. Any adventures you buy have favor rewards for completion, so you buying adventures increases the amount of favor, and thus Turbine points that you can earn. Adventure pack purchases are account-wide, so, if you really wanted to have the max number of characters on each server, they can almost pay for themselves. The cheaper Adventure packs start at 250 Turbine Points. Shan-To-Kor is a good first one, if you’re not sure which to get, because completion of the whole quest series grants you a permanent discount in the Marketplace, and it also grants Coin Lord favor, which unlocks additional inventory space.
That’s all a bit time consuming for me, mind you. Grinding away across multiple servers and characters just to get Turbine points is not especially fun. It does all depend upon your available time and finances, of course, but keep in mind that a Turbine point is worth approximately 1.5 US cents. Myself, I try to walk a path that involves buying some points, while trying to maximise any free points I can get without knocking myself out. It’s worth noting that you only need to buy points once, even the smallest $6.50 pack, in order for your account to be upgraded permanently to a Premium account, which has far less restrictions than a completely free one, and will make your time in Stormreach much more pleasurable.
VIP
Premium
Free
Monthly Fee
Yes
No
No
Turbine Points
500/month Store Purchase Favor Reward
Store Purchase Favor Reward
Store Purchase Favor Reward
Classes & Races
Basic & Premium Free Favor Unlocked per Server Buyable for All Servers
Basic Free Favor Unlocked per Server Buyable for All Servers
Basic Free Favor Unlocked per Server Buyable for All Servers
Warforged are a race specific to Eberron, the setting for Turbine’s Dungeons and Dragons Online. Constructs built with one purpose in mind; the waging of war. Their creators were a little too clever for their own good, and in their pursuit of building walking weapons that would be able to make good decisions without direction, they accidentally managed to imbue them with sentience. For a while this wasn’t too much of a problem, as the Warforged were happy to do what they were told, which mostly involved hitting whoever they were told to.
The problem with sentience is that eventually you start wonder exactly why you’re hitting these people, and why you have to do what the shouty person tells you anyway. As the outside world realised that Warforged were indeed people, rather than simple machines, the public became uncomfortable on a number of grounds. As a result, at the end of the war, Warforged were given the same rights as any other sentient being, most importantly “self-ownership”. At the same time, the House Cannith creation forges which produced them were destroyed.
That leaves today’s Warforged in an odd position. There will never be any more of them (unless rumours of surviving forges are to be believed), but they do not age, and are fairly robust. Having known little more than war for their short lives, and having not been taught anything beyond what was of use to their masters, they are now sent out into the world, possessed with an insatiable curiosity, and a desire to become more than they have been.
So it was that Armonica the Warforged arrived on the continent of Xen’drik. Wandering for a time, seeking purpose, until one day he happened upon a musician playing in Stormreach’s marketplace. So taken with the beauty of the song was he that he decided, there and then, that he was going to be a bard, making music for all to hear!
Warforged, on the whole, are not very good musicians. Their stat modifiers are +2 Constitution, -2 Wisdom, and -2 Charisma, leaving them weak in the very stat that a Bard needs most, charisma. Nevertheless, what they lack in natural talent they make up for in enthusiasm, and before too long Armonica was playing bass lute in a local band.
He only knows three chords so far, but he plays them well.
In DDO the great strength of the Warforged is their immunities. Poison, disease, energy draining, sleep, exhaustion, nausea, and paralysis simply do not affect them. Neither do they need to breathe, so have no fear of water. They also have enhancements and feats that will increase their damage resistance. The main downside (apart from Rust Monsters) to avoiding so many of adventuring’s nuisances is that healing spells do not affect them as strongly. Starting out, a heal will only fix 50% of what it would on a fully organic being, though there are enhancements that a Warforged can take to raise that amount. There is also a line of wizardly repair spells, mirroring the clerical cures, that do have a full affect on them, which makes a Warforged wizard or sorcerer quite an interesting proposition.
Unfortunately, their difficulty to heal has made them somewhat unpopular with the more closed-minded of Eberron’s flesh-based population. This is not really fair, as while an individual heal does fix them less than otherwise, they also require less fixing in the first place. Happily, as a bard Armonica has some healing spells, so it tends not to be an issue.
Warforged are not one of the basic races available under the Free to Play scheme, costing 595 Turbine Points at normal prices. They’re so “Eberonny” though that I could not resist splashing out, especially as I was used to having them available to me as a subscriber in Europe.
He’s actually Rogue 1, Fighter 1, Bard 1 at the moment, but the majority of his levels going forward will be bard. I find it difficult to create a character that doesn’t have the ability to deal with at least some of the traps and locks that will present themselves. The level of fighter was to unlock a wide range of weaponry, and also for the free feat, which I took glee in spending on the Exotic Weapon Proficiency of Great Crossbow, which could just as easily be called a small ballista.
He’s the only character I’ve gotten into Massively’s OnedAwesome guild so far. If you see him, give him a wave, and remember to be kind to your Warforged colleagues, as they’re the ones who’ll be dragging your life crystals back to the shrine when you all get cloudkilled.
DDO, for the most part, follows D&D’s paper rules quite closely, but there are a few glaring exceptions that can catch folks out. Such is the case of grazing hits.
Grazing hits occur when you have not managed to roll high enough to beat your opponents AC, but have still rolled fairly high. Players do grazing hits on a roll higher than 10, but far more important is that monsters also do grazing hits.
How often a monster does a grazing hit depends on the dungeon difficulty. The threshholds have been tweaked a few times, but at the moment appear to be:
Normal: 17 or higher
Hard: 15 or higher
Elite 13 or higher
As you can see, on Elite, 40% of monster attacks are going to do you some damage, no matter how high your AC is, (as a roll of 20 is an automatic proper hit).
A grazing hit only does base weapon damage, such as d6 for a shortsword, even if it’s a +5 shortsword of flaming, it still does just d6. If it’s a greatsword, it’ll be 2d6. Some monster’s physical attacks are very substantial, even when just considering base weapon damage.
Fortunately, players get some respite from grazing hits, as we are born with a feat that reduces our damage received by 50%. Shields and centred monks also get a % reduction in grazing hit damage. These reductions take place after Damage Reduction has been applied.
However, especially on elite, if you are being stabbed at by several enemies, each of whom is going to score a grazing hit if they roll 13-19 for half base weapon damage, you are in very real danger of being rapidly nibbled to death.
While we might argue over the maths, at the least it is very useful to all to have some source of damage reduction, as even a single point of DR can make a very real difference to how well you deal with the regular smallish amounts of damage from grazing hits.
You can read more about this subject here, and here.
By all accounts Free to Play (F2P) Dungeons and Dragons Online has been a roaring success. In my own investigations I have found multiple packed low level instances filled to the brim with folks asking foolish newbie questions. Counter-intuitively, DDO subscriptions are up 40%, presumably because the F2P model allowed players enough time and content to get a bit hooked, and be sure they liked what they’d be getting. Myself, I am sticking with an F2P account, though I confess I spent some money to buy enough Turbine Points to unlock the Warforged and Monk, and grab a couple of adventure packs. I shall be endeavouring not to spend any further cash, and perhaps the free points you get during gameplay and the free content will be enough to keep me in adventures for now.
To my mind DDO has been brought back from the dead, with a second chance at glory. It had a lacklustre launch with insufficient promotion, never really making the splash it deserved. An awful lot like Everquest 2, in fact. Both games have been hiding in WoW’s shadow for far too long. I can only hope that the influx of money to Turbine will be put to good use feeding an ever-expanding DDO live-team. I’ll give Turbine one hint: If you’ll finally sort out Gnomes, and their Dragonmark, I’d be willing to spend a few points on unlocking that.
There was a time when EQ2 also sold adventure packs. Sundered Splitpaw, Bloodlines, and the Fallen Dynasty (the Isle of Mara) were all sold as online-only mini expansions for the price of $7.99 (if memory serves me right) These days they come as part of your core install, and they were sizable chunks of content worth their asking price. At some point, SOE realised that they could get that much money for a single appearance-only hat, which took a lot less effort. There have been no adventure packs since Legends of Norrath and the Station Cash shop opened.
Recently there has been a great deal of unhappiness with a new development in EQ2’s love affair with RMT (Real Money Transactions). In the next set of Legends of Norrath cards, there will be a loot card which grants one-time access to a special dungeon. Given how difficult it will be for anyone to get that card, it must be pretty awesome in that dungeon.
In DDO when you buy an adventure pack, which grants you access to a set of dungeons forever, you know exactly how much it will cost you. Everquest 2 expects you to gamble, buying packs of cards until you are lucky enough to get the one you want. I do not know the exact odds, but my experiences with getting loot cards from my free packs suggests you would need to buy a great number to stand a good chance of getting the specific loot card which opens the dungeon. This will restrict the number of people who get to experience this dungeon to the extremely lucky, and the obsessively addicted.
It is about time that Everquest 2 ended the charade that most people buy Legends of Norrath to play the card game. They do it for the loot cards, and it is a cynical exploitive way for SOE to make money. They should just remove loot cards from LoN, add them to the shop, and sell them honestly with upfront pricing, rather than forcing its customers to buy lottery tickets in the hopes of getting to experience new content. It should be noted that EQ2 also has a subscription fee. I do not think that having both extreme RMT AND a mandatory subscription charge is sustainable. I’d be happy for the RMT to go away, but I think that is not the way the MMO winds are blowing these days
Given the success of Free Realms, I have a feeling that EQ2 may be making the leap to being Free to Play, supported by RMT, with an optional subscription like Free Realms and DDO have. The streaming technology used by Free Realms has been adapted for use in EQ2 (and was responsible for the dreadful memory issues many people experienced after Live Update 53), and will be enabled at the time of the next expansion to make for a smoother new player experience. We have been promised that there will, at that time, be a great influx of new players, and I doubt that’s going to happen just because they get to start in Halas. My prediction is that Everquest 2 is going F2P. Feel free to poke fun at me if I turn out to be wrong.
Update 29th July, 2010: In the end, EQ2 did go F2P, though not in the way I hoped for. You can read about that here.
MILWAUKEE, Wis. (AP) — A sad day for fans of role-playing games: The man who co-created Dungeons & Dragons is dead.
Gary Gygax died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. His wife Gail says the 69-year-old had been suffering from health problems for several years.
Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 using medieval characters and mythical creatures. The game known for its oddly shaped dice eventually was turned into video games, books and movies.
It’s considered the grandfather of fantasy role-playing games and has inspired legions of adoring fans. Gygax’s wife says he always enjoyed hearing from them. – Associated Press
Here’s the great man at his best:
Goodbye Gary. The only time our lives directly intersected was that time you commented on that DDO related Youtube post I did (Sadly taken down by the authorities :( ), but you gave my generation the chance to use our imaginations in ways that had never been possible before. Your work will live on. I’ll be rolling some dice in your honour this Thursday, and my cleric will strike down evil in your memory.
The Green Lodge took our first trip to Redwillow last night, and we were most impressed by it. Not least because of the sheer number of chests we found! It’s nice to come out in profit. We met our first giants. Meeting a new monster is always a cause for excitement for us, and we were right glad that half of us were dwarves.
While searching for a lever to open a chest I couldn’t pick, poor Jorreck, bane of all poisons, got solidly stuck behing a rock and had to recall. Later, when turning in the items we were questing for, we had a horrible time. We couldn’t find the research scrolls that we had most definitely picked up (but we weren’t sure by who), and so couldn’t continue with the quest. We must have spent 20 minutes searching for them, and poking the NPC. Finally our ingenious bard, Flere, realised that they must have been left behind the rock when Jorreck recalled out, and of course no-one had looked behind there for fear of getting stuck.
So hurrah, we managed to continue. It made me think about how quick we are to label things bugs, when sometimes it’s just misfortune, or not knowing (forgetting in our case) how the game-world works. Of course, getting stuck behind things (though thats the only time we can remember it happening), and chests that are unopenable, really are bugs.
We shall be returning, I am sure of that. While looking for details on the chest we couldn’t open I came upon a list of the rare loot that can be found in Redwillow, and I think we can find homes for all of it.
Been a busy week. After the DnL debacle, I was still thirsting for a world based MMORPG to supplement DDO.
I was persuaded by some good friends on the DDO irc channel to give the new Everquest progression server a try. It’s a new sort of server, where each everquest expansion has to be unlocked by the players, usually by someone raiding the nastiest enemies of the previous expansion.
What I found out: That I have no idea why I ever found it fun. It’s ugly, laggy, and as for corpse runs, well, I don’t know why we ever put up with that nonsense. I just find myself getting horribly bored. I will persevere for now though.
Seeing as I was going to break my vow of never touching another SOE game (They keep buying everyone else anyway. At this rate I’d never play a MMORPG again.), I figured I might as well go for the Access account option, and have a little poke around EQ2. The game has changed a great deal since April 2005 when I quit, and I found I had no idea how to play my existing characters, at least not without doing grave harm to their kills to deaths ratio.
So I decided to start a new character on the newest servers. These happened to be PvP ones, but I figured, hey, it’ll make being a questaholic more challenging.
What I found out: That non-consensual PvP sucks horribly. If I step out into Antonica, within a minute I’ll be dead from some stealther sneak-attacking me. Given the feebleness of my reaction times, and my utter lack of killer instinct, this is not going to be a long lived experience. Nevertheless, until I stepped out into Antonica, I was having fun, so I shall keep my eyes open for a fresh regular server being opened. That seems pretty rare though, unfortunately. A shame, as there is nothing like the delicious taste of a clean start. Til then, my much mistreated Access acount will be put back into it’s state of suspended animation. Probably. Unless I get really bored.
I am anticipating DDO’s Module 2 with something akin to the feeling I get when someone waves a bag of pork scratchings before me (Sadly an all-too uncommon event). If QA clear it in time, it’ll be this week.
