It's been an fascinating week for me in Dungeons and Dragons Online, and while that's obviously a personal point of view, I've come away from it with some observations on the community.
Exploring Eberron: Community and community division
OnedAwesome
Executive Producer Fernando Paiz told me at PAX that Turbine will start turning its collective eye back to the veteran players, and it looks like Update 7 is the first step in that direction. My Update 7 tour set me thinking, as did Wednesday night's outing with OnedAwesome, Massively's DDO guild. Follow along after the jump as I take a glance at what these factors have told me about the community in Dungeons and Dragons Online.
OdA has been working through Ruins of Threnal lately, and they tackled the east excavation last night. The guild is a pleasant combination of newer and veteran players, and it works well thanks to the patient vets bringing the newbies along and teaching as they go. Every week is a crash work in some game element or another, and somebody new comes away knowing a bit more. Last night's crash work centered around the properties and advantages of adamantine and metalline weapons (they bypass destroy reduction on plenty of enemies that you'd otherwise barely touch), as well as why it's a awful idea to beat on granite gargoyles with most melee weapons.
Let's start with the latest adventures of OnedAwesome. they had an exciting night Wednesday, as I finally bought the guild's first airship. they had a small celebration on board, opened imaginary champagne, and high-fived our lone bought crew member, a Silver Flame Priest. they rewarded our appreciation with a protective spell, and off they went to start adventuring.
Since I'm not able to be online as much as i love to field guild invitations and questions these days, I added a few new officers to the roster to help share that responsibility. If you'd like to join a weekly event or have questions about OdA, you can send a tell or mail in game to any of six characters: Rubialina, Aunwiira, or Tebraen.
While I don't know that OnedAwesome will ever be a hardcore nightly raid guild, I've been happy with how the members have adapted. The veteran DDO players and those who have been in the guild since its creation really extend themselves to make everyone feel welcome under any circumstances. While DDO's instancing process forces us to run on Wednesday nights in separate groups, it's always been fun marking each group's progress through the quests in guild chat.
Community
Next week we'll be doing The Abandoned Excavation, the third part of the Ruins of Threnal. This part of the quest arc requires that the Western and Eastern Excavations be completed first, so if you'd like to join us, make positive you've got those six wrapped up. in the event you get in contact with any of the above characters, they may even be able to set up a time to make positive you've got some company to quest with! Otherwise, we'll be beginning on Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. EDT as usual. finally, I'll be making things a bit more fascinating as they quest next week, with some prizes at the finish of the evening in several different categories.
This isn't entirely a bad or unnecessary thing, and I completely comprehend why it exists. High-end DDO is something different from the first half of the game, and last year's enormous inflow of newbies sharpened that contrast a bit. It's completely understandable, because in most cases it's basically impossible for these people to share the same understanding and experience of the game. Things get more complicated as you progress, as well as a true knowledge of the way it all works basically comes with time.
As I mentioned earlier, the sense of community in the guild is something that I've been happy about, and it's set me thinking a bit about the DDO community overall. I've been an active member of over one gambling community, and this one has one of the strongest and clearest divisions I've ever seen.
As is common in any community, the most negative are often the loudest, and it creates the impression of a closed-off and unwelcoming -- sometimes hostile -- community to the casual eye. there is a fantastic community here in DDO, but you require to work to ignore the wall of sound that can hide it.
The part of this that has always disappointed me is that there is a significant and outspoken portion of the playerbase that has been around since the beginning, and this group has a strongly negative outlook on how things are in DDO today. they detest what Turbine has completed to "their" game; they detest all these new players walking around getting in the way; and they detest the proliferation of low-level quests created to introduce these people to DDO. they don't detest it to discover a game that they actually enjoy playing, but they do detest it to insert their frustration and negativity in to every aspect of the game that they can.
I'm interested to see how things progress for the DDO community in the next year. I doubt that the truly hardcore longtime vets will ever embrace this larger community, but the newbies have had a year to settle in, Turbine is prepared to return to higher-level content, and I really think the community at giant is about to close that gap.
What's fascinating is that the nice parts of the community echo the style of the game itself: they strike me as instanced. The public areas can be loud, overwhelming, and rife with anger, but six times you discover a group you're comfortable with, it's a fantastic experience. I've always firmly believed that finding a nice guild is the key to success in most MMOs, and this holds even more true in my eyes for DDO.
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Community is of great utilization.
Posted by: dosoftisland@hotmail.com | 12/21/2010 at 10:58 下午