The US DDO servers are currently down for a hotfix, which began at 1 pm EST, and is due to finish at 5 pm EST.
This is primarily to fix a serious problem that was introduced with yesterday’s Update. The new guild renown system was causing serious and unexpected lag across the servers, and had to be disabled after a couple hours of the servers coming up yesterday. It was a little frustrating for guilds who were fired up and ready to go on a guild-levelling spree, especially given that it was the major feature for the update. With any luck, today’s tweaks will allow everybody to get back on the journey to owning a fancy new airship.
Before the Guild Renown was switched off, we were making pretty good progress towards Guild Level 5. Parcels of renown can be found in chests, as end-rewards, and in small amounts for killing monsters. It is thought that it was the renown from monsters, randomly occurring after kills, that was responsible for the lag.
Here’s the patchnotes for today’s hotfix:
* Guild Renown is once again dropping from monster kills, treasure chests and end rewards.
* It is no longer possible to reassign Guild Renown found in treasure chests to other party members.
* Monk handwraps that have mutations with a save are no longer having the effect go off 100% of the time. The party had to end at some point.
* A bug in the Black Mausoleum quest has been fixed and the adventure will once again be open for players.
* We have resolved the issue behind the server crashes that were occurring after the release of Update 5.
It’s a major update incoming for Dungeons and Dragons Online tomorrow, as the Carnival of Shadows rolls into Stormreach.
Aside from the new lowish-level adventure series, I’m particularly looking forward to seeing the new guild system in action. I’ll be lending a hand with OnedAwesome’s levelling, and will report on our lovely new flying ship next week.
Clerics and Monks gain new Prestige enhancement lines, and I’ll be aiming my monk at the Daelkyr-fighting Shintao path. The only Wizard Prestige path, the necromantic Pale Master, has been made much more viable by the addition of extra negative energy arcane spells, and other tweaks. My main character, coincidentally called Arkenor, is more of a conjuring/transmuting persuasion, and he’ll find the new Augment Summoning feat a must have, and will be swapping out Eschew Materials for it.
* Augment Summoning
o Benefit: Your summoned creatures, charmed minions, and hirelings have +4 to all ability scores, increased health, and increased fortification.
o Special: Wizards may select this feat when they receive bonus feats.
Augment Summoning looks to be massively useful to Necromancers, Enchanters, Conjurers, and just about anyone anyone who uses hirelings, charms, or summons. As hirelings are getting boosted already in this update, combining that with this feat may lead to to me developing an inferiority complex when I see them in action!
Poor DDO Arkenor might need that boost, because it sounds like his dual-wielding antics are going to be somewhat reduced, as off-hand attacks are changed from being assured at certain points in the attack sequence, to being a chance-based proc. I’m not going to get too upset about that until I see it in action, but it does sound like it might be harsh on dual-wielders who aren’t also rangers. I hope his particular style of melee wizard remains viable.
The dual-wielding changes are intended to reduce lag in raids, mostly, and I would have preferred it if the changes then only applied in raid situations, leaving the rest of the game to use the current system. We’ll see next week how big a difference the new system really makes.
Arkenor and his rooftop Mace Kata.
The new trapmaking feat, that allows you to assemble traps and grenades from ingredients gleaned from traps you’ve dismantled, also sounds pretty great, and leaves me in something of a quandary. Ark is currently Wizard 8/Rogue 3, and I wasn’t planning on him taking any more rogue. However, now that Trapmaking is a free feat with Rogue 4, I’m getting rather tempted. I may resist, and leave trapmaking for my d’Kundarak Paladin/Rogue engineer. (Remind me to do “Dark Moments in Character Building” posts on both those chaps.)
In addition to these changes which caught my eye, there is a thick and nutritious soup of general tweaks and fixes that is sure to leave everybody feeling filled with patch-day wonder. It’s an impressive body of work that leaves me already looking forward to hearing what Update 6 involves. I’m still holding out for GNOMES!
The full notes follow after the leap (If you’re on the front page). They’re the preview release notes from last week on Lamannia, so they may change a little for tomorrow, but probably not by much.
Today we announce that GOA will cease publishing, operating and subscription services for Warhammer® Online: Age of Reckoning® (WAR) in Europe and transition the operation of the game to Mythic Entertainment.
We have enjoyed a lot of great times with you. Over the past couple of years we have fostered a fantastically vibrant and active community; we saw the world’s first Tchar’Zanek and Karl Franz kills pre 1.3.5 and hosted undeniably some of the most professional guilds to ever play WAR.
Over the next few weeks we will be working very closely with the Mythic Team to ensure you all get settled as smoothly as possible. We wish to assure you that all characters, guilds and account information will be migrated to Mythic servers and will be available to present and past players.
We will share more information on next steps, together with a FAQ, in the coming days.
Few who played on the European servers for Warhammer or Dark Age of Camelot will miss GOA terribly much, although we did get to miss the multiple billing debacle that plagued Mythic customers a few months back.
If the GOA servers are moved to sit alongside the current Mythic ones, that does present additional future opportunities for server mergers, when necessary. That may be the driving force behind this move, though relations between Mythic and GOA have reportedly been strained for a while, with DaoC already having been repatriated to Mythic earlier this year.
I’m somewhat concerned as to what this might mean for the localised servers, as I think GOA was responsible for the translated builds. It is important that US MMO companies make sure that European players do not feel they are treated worse than US players, but with the modern internet it’s not really all that necessary to have the servers physically located in Europe. It was good of Mythic to at least try to give us equal service, by employing GOA, even if it did not always work out quite as well as hoped. Hopefully that positive attitude will continue as our servers and accounts are relocated.
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
I quite like writing little guides to things. They’re popular, fun to do, and most importantly, useful. However, it’s not always easy for an experienced player to see what aspects of a game might be troublesome for newer players.
So, this goes out to the good readers of this blog. Is there anything in particular you’d like to see explained in Everquest 2, DDO, or other games? Maybe not something you have trouble with yourself, but something you’ve seen other players struggle with?
A website for Fallout Online has materialised, complete with the old time music that I always associate with the Fallout games. There’s no actual information about the game as yet; just a form for signing up to a mailing list and beta access, which I have duly filled out.
The uncharitable might say that there already is an online version of Fallout, called Fallen Earth. There’s certainly a lot of similarities in the setting, even if the storyline is a bit different. Who would have expected there’d be more than one major MMO with a post-apocalyptic US setting? With the backing of Bethesda and Interplay, Fallout Online ought to have every chance of being the better game, but the tiny Icarus Studios has set the bar pretty high.
I was a huge fan of Fallout and Fallout 2, though I skipped Fallout 3, mostly due to still being utterly irritated at the disappointment of Oblivion. I’m looking forward to seeing how Fallout Online pans out. Something to build a dream on? We’ll see.
With the dust setting from the introduction of Halas, and the Druid Circle world event, it’s time to check in again with Maltheas, and the Extreme Questers! When I last put together a leaderboard, just before Halas went live, it looked like this:
There’s big changes this month, as for the first time I’m including the 60-69 level range:
The level 49 Icelad, sitting on 3063, is extremely impressive, and I wonder if I can find another 400 doable quests before Maltheas himself reaches that level. He’s certainly the one to beat at the moment. The folks sitting on 49, 59, and 69 make me wonder if they are in fact Battlegrounds characters trying to max their AA points, rather than specifically extreme questers, but I’ll enjoy competing with them whatever their goal is!
Adding the level 60+ folks has obviously knocked Maltheas down the table a bit, but that is all good, because it gives me a bit more of an impetus. It’s important to be reminded that, even though Maltheas is doing well for his level, there’s a couple of thousand folks with more quests done lurking up ahead in the higher level tables.
Around a hundred of the new quests Malth has done are from the Halas and Frostfang Sea additions, with another 24 from the Druid Circle event. The rest come from a range of sources, particularly pushing deeper into the land of Everfrost, and the tier 4 heroic dungeons. Everfrost is pushing Maltheas to his very limits, and since I took the pictures for the new leaderboard I’ve let him to rise to level 42, allowing him a couple of equipment upgrades though nothing of much use in the way of new spells, so hopefully he can push a bit further.
Doing Frostfang and Everfrost so close together has left me a little snowblinded, so I’m glad of the opportunities to revisit greener lands that I have had recently when occasionally lending Stillwater and Deyotol a hand. I’m a bit of a soloist by nature, but it makes a nice change to share an adventure or two.
