DDO Players News Episode 18 Nothing Beats Bacon!

3 comments

1. 

   Sympl / February 5, 2015

   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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2. 

   Draculetta / February 5, 2015

   Those are some GREAT Points.. I never even really thought about the whole “Anon” thing and how that would effect it..

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3. 

   bonniebew / February 9, 2015

   Trying to do ‘The Binder Rescue’ without disarming traps is stacking the deck against a poor Barbarian! But kudos for trying!

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