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The current lag we are chasing seems to be a problem with guild ships loading and unloading. It is intermittent which means we can’t reproduce the problem in house yet, but we see it happening on live servers. If a player happens to be on the server process with the misbehaving guild ship instance they can see server side lag. We are working on it.
That said, a majority of players won’t see this when it happens as it is limited to one specific instance.
We are also working to reduce lag caused by some Wheloon dungeons that also seem to be problematic.
Will that entirely stop lag? My pessimistic side thinks it’s unlikely. When we fix these issues it is likely that other sources of lag will be revealed that are hidden/masked by these issues. This will be an ongoing battle for a bit as we track down and eliminate various problems that can hurt server performance. We appreciate that players have been patient while we work out these issues.
Severlin on Hirelings AI Fixes
All engineering resources are tied up with chasing down these lag issues. Once we get some traction on that then hireling AI is high on the list. One of the first changes we want to make is having hirelings who are set to stay in place have a really short leashing distance. That should allow hirelings set to Stay and Guard to fight in a small tight area without running off into traps every time you get pinged with damage.
Before Warlock we discussed the possibility of the Knight class (from the PH2) with the Player’s Council. We have a good design and had good feedback on it but even then it was hard to justify the direct competition with Fighter and Paladin. One of the council members had a great idea of having the Knight have a Man/Woman at Arms which we really liked, but looking back at Artificer the work involved in adding a scaling pet to a class was really expensive, and players could argue that until we work on Artificer pets scaling well into epic adding another class with a companion would be hard to justify.
Psionics is a whole new power source and we couldn’t do it justice trying to release a single class. Not only would it feel orphaned with no story support but the normal psionic shtick (spell points) is already used by our casters. An orphaned Psion would function just like a Sorcerer unless we took the time to add new mechanics and the infrastructure for the Psionic power source to the game. In order for us to add Psionics my feeling would be that we would need a whole update with at least Psion and Psychic Warrior. We’d also need to design psionic itemization and storylines for it to feel complete. You know if we did that there would be a lot of players immediately wanting Soul Blades.
We picked Warlock specifically because it’s DPS comes largely from Eldritch Blast rather than its spells and that right there will help differentiate the class from our casters.
~ Not for update 25.
~ Regular class, not iconic.
~ The systems designers can help look into lag, but ultimately our engineers are working on lag.
When we do a new race at some point in the far unannounced future which I am in no way committing to it would be gnomes. With cosmetic and tree options for Deep Gnomes if we can do that, but mostly because I am a fan of Svirfneblin and I would be using my position as Producer to unfairly push for those options.
The DDO Chronicle Issue 128
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DDO Players News
DDO Players Screen Shot Of The Week #7
News Beyond DDO
Week in DDO
Drac Week
Rogue LVL 12
Thernal
The Flame Lords Haven
The Giants Supplies *Hard*
The Giants Lair *Elite*
Ranger/Rogue Lvl 10
Thernal
- Giant Lieutenants (killed after completion)
- The Library of Threnal (Hard)
- Escort the Expedition (Normal – narrated by Arneson)
- Hold for Reinforcements
Pineleaf Week
Artificer Lvl 10
- Giant Lieutenants (killed after completion)
- The Library of Threnal (Hard)
- Escort the Expedition (Normal – narrated by Arneson)
- Hold for Reinforcements
Bard 2 (PD)
- Korthos Village
- The Storehouse’s Secret
- The Cannith Crystal
- The Collaborator
- Korthos Island
- Redemptiom
- Necromancer’s Doom
- Stopping the Sahuagin
- Sacrifices
- Misery’s Peak
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Featured Comments
Sympl left a comment on DDO Players News Episode 17 Ghola-Fan Stalker!
PDK (Purple Dragon Knights) are human, not dwarves. And they are fighters at least by design at level 1. You can always (and some people do) use a +1 heart to swap out of it and into something else. It’s slightly misleading as visually they kind of have the half-orc shaped body. Part of the build glory in using a PDK is the ability to use charisma as your attack/damage modifier instead of Strength. One of the interesting builds I have seen highlighting this aspect is a 9Monk/8Fighter/3Paladin able to wield a Greatsword as a Ki Weapon. Also…you should check out the size of a PDK in Druid wolf form. 🙂 It’s impressive to say the least. This is just spur of the moment thinking, but I can imagine a PDK Fighter/Sorc hybrid would do quite well too. CHA being suddenly a common stat of great importance. At any rate, don’t let a bad experience keep you from some neat builds. Especially as the Iconic characters all really do have so neat “quirks” that realy set them apart from the other races.
Bonniebew DDO Players News Episode 18 Nothing Beats Bacon!
Trying to do ‘The Binder Rescue’ without disarming traps is stacking the deck against a poor Barbarian! But kudos for trying!
Sympl Left a comment on DDO Players News Episode 18 Nothing Beats Bacon!
This reply comes with a disclaimer. I am biased and will be making no attempt at neutrality. I play on Thelanis as my home server and have been playing since just before level cap went to 12 from level 10. I was here for the first anniversary celebration. I have seen changes and reversions and have weathered all of it while still enjoying the game. I often hear people complain about low server volumes. I do not believe this to be the case in most instances. Much like the frequent complaint of lag, sometimes it’s real and most of the time it’s client-side issues of one kind or another (hardware, terminate-and-stay-resident programs, low RAM, etc.). I will offer three points in defense of my belief. I know a LOT of people that prefer to play /anon. I have even within the last week seen three different public channel questions about how to enter this status and whether or not they had to manually enter it upon login every time or not. This means that when searching for players on the social panel, they will be excluded giving the impression of fewer people. And even amongst the people who don’t play anonomously, there are people like me who party when I need to but prefer to solo 9 times out of 10. Secondly, with the increasing push towards guilds and the (advisable) use of the friends list, many, many people open parties first to guildies, second to friends and finally to PUGs assuming they haven’t filled. This is not true of everyone, but the fact that it is relatively a common practive means that the LFM panel is less populated than it potentially used to be. And third and finally, with the advent of cannith crafting and free-to-play, the Auction House is nowhere near what it used to be. I used to post up every single piece of loot I pulled for 50%-100% of it’s value as buyout and that’s how I made my plat reserves. These days all my stuff goes into the crafting hopper unless it’s something particularly good and then I’m more likely to pass it on or bank it instead of AHing it. (On a side note, there’s also a considerable lack of what I would call “quality” random-gen heroic gear these days anyways due to the state of the game and it’s loot modifiers, but that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms.) And since “basic” F2P (not Premium) only get to post one item to the Auction House at a time….well, whatever percentage of the population that happens to be probably isn’t posting much up there either. In conclusion, there isn’t really a good way to determine what a server pop truly is. The Social panel isn’t accurate, The Auction House variety isn’t a solid tell and anecdotal perception is skewed 100% of the time.
The best advice I can give regarding dealing with the problem is to become a friendly and reliable player. You don’t have to be great, just don’t be a liablity. Then start cultivating people on your friend’s list that you enjoy playing with so you can see when they are on and possibly join a guild that has plenty of those people in it. When you have a pool of people you CAN play with and you aren’t being avoided by them, then server pop is mostly irrelevant anyways, You can only group with 6-12 people at a time, yo.
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Hello Pineleaf and Draculetta,
I play Kerkos on Orien server. I’m not sure which episode I was listening to as I’m hitting the recent ones and catching up on the first 10 or so that I didn’t get “live”, but I was about to yell at the radio when you said you were going to buy the favoured soul class. There are quite a few things that you can buy with TPs or earn with favour. Drow race and favoured soul class being the easier of rewards that are earnable with favour. The DDOWiki has a page devoted to favour that you can see the different tiers and the possible total favour earnable for each patron and for total world favor so you can decide for yourself if the favour grind or spending TPs is the way to go. Keep up the good work with the cast. I’ve been at this for a few years and I’m still learning nifty things on top of Turbine continuing to change the rules!
Brian
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