Yak Cast 11 “Kill Bill DDO VOL. 1″

XP penalty upon death in DDO was made of fail! You lost so much XP that a single death at the high levels would wipe out almost all of the XP you’d gain for the completion. It wasn’t fun and encouraged people to run easy quests below their level and not take risks. Some people were also falling thousands of XP in the negative and LOSING progress in a night; they added XP debt regen (some people whined about that), but it wasn’t enough. It really just took the wind out of your sails if you died several times and wound up 30,000 XP in the hole for the night.

Casual difficulty I fully support. One of my guildies made a point last night that I’m kind of kicking myself for not getting myself, since my dad had rheumatoid arthritis and scleraderma really bad: People with physical disabilities who lack twitch skills might lack the ability to play on normal difficulty levels, so they can play on casual to enable them to play the game. As far as I’m concerned, that trumps any argument against casual difficulty I’ve heard, period. The End.

I think that a lot of the changes they’ve made so far aren’t really “dumbing down” the game. The old style of character entry into the game world was nothing special and far inferior to Korthos in a lot of ways (Korthos quests are largely just those old quests chopped up and put back together, except for the Storehouse/scroll quest, which is virtually identical to the original Goodblade version except for the story). What essentially it meant was that you’d have to fly through three easy quests to get to the main part of the harbor (you used to start where the Inspired Quarter is now), then do a quick run through the FIRST TWO parts of waterworks to get market access. That didn’t really require you to prove your skill, it was just a minor inconvenience at worst.

Only up to the first hour…maybe more later.

While not what I was originally going for there, I suppose I could do that sometime.

Losing a bonus is not the same thing as gaining a debt. It’s not fun to have a bad night and wind up with a huge debt, getting only 4,000 XP on quest completion to offset the 15,000 in debt you just got from a couple of deaths (deaths that may even have been lag related at not your fault). People would whine and bitch at the clerics for letting them die and suffering the XP debt; it wasn’t pretty. And like Jerry said, when the debt started to regenerate, people would simply choose to not play and let that debt go away. That’s not healthy for the game.

Furthermore, the repair cost to items on death is insignificant at low levels and still only a very minor annoyance at most at high levels. If you are dying enough (at any level) that the plat cost is a problem at all, you’re doing something wrong.

Here’s a test. I took a level 12 character, with several pieces of twink gear that’s more expensive than what a normal character of that level would have, and hit /death. The repair bill was…

*drum roll*

172 plat.

Hardly a “hefty repair bill” for a level 12 character.

That won’t be a problem. Favor rewards, including TP, give people a reason to run quests on higher difficulty levels. There’s also the fact that you get an XP bonus with no repeat penalty by running a quest the first time on the various difficulty levels.

Besides, you could make exactly the same argument about Normal. Virtually no one runs normal-only up to level 20. Why would they dip down to casual to do the same? It doesn’t make sense.

If you looked at the average person’s favor list, I doubt you’d see “Normal” all the way down the line. Especially since it’s worth TP most people I’ve seen try to do a quest as hard as they can; they don’t just settle for normal. There are a minority of quests (Amrath and a couple Vale quests) that are rough, but they’re all late game quests. Plus, if they’re so hard people are running them on low difficulty levels, then that’s really kind of what we want, right? A challenge available for those who want it?

People don’t take the easiest path to 20 now by running normal only; why would they start doing it with casual?

If they want to do that, then I don’t really see the problem. Different people enjoy the game in different ways (and many solo-ers exist today and don’t run normal-only).

Most people won’t do this, though. Once favor was implemented in mid 2006, almost everyone wanted to run quests on hard and elite, and that was way before TP existed. I have no reason to think that things are suddenly going to change because of casual.

If and when they try to run raids or hard/elite along the way or at the end, they’ll be in for a rude awakening. But really, you can’t stop bad players from doing stupid things. When they stop running on casual they’ll find out that 120 hp at level 16 is unacceptable and they’ll either adapt or die.

…says the guy who has a billion alts across a bunch of servers after like a couple of months.

With so many different builds available, DDO has never been short of low level people…and it never will again since the introduction of FTP.

There’s always been a few dead levels though, and these levels always change as the level cap goes up. It’s a range that’s more than 3 levels lower than the cap (ie, it was about 10-12 when the cap was 16, it’s about 15-16 now) where groups are harder to find.

Enh, we didn’t hit endgame critical mass during the 11 month gap between DDO: U and the previous update when the game was stagnating with almost no new players and dying….so I have no reason to believe that it will happen now that we have an influx of new players.

Plus, you can get more than 10 character slots now. You couldn’t do that before, and you couldn’t unlock things like 32 point builds on other servers without earning the favor normally. People are more likely than ever to reroll and make new characters.

There are reasons why anyone might want to flag for some raids on casual. What if you want to get gianthold relics yet already have all the quests on elite? Odds are, you’ll elite everything out there without getting all 60 relics. Many people might want to just complete the grind on casual.

The Vale might be similar — what if you want another greensteel item but have everything out there on elite? I don’t see anything wrong with people collecting another set of pie slices on casual there.

I’d like to mention something else. I did an experiment earlier, running my Orien character (level 7) through Tear of Dhakaan on casual. I have to say that while I was never really in danger of dying, I am also a 4 year vet and know what I’m doing. There’s still some challenge in there and it’s most certainly not a bag of free XP on casual. I can definitely see a duo or trio of inexperienced players getting some challenge out of that quest on the casual setting.

Given that, I can only assume that the average player will probably not be able to handle soloing the endgame on casual. Amrath is absolutely brutal and even on normal a group of unsuspecting casuals will get butchered. Casual does not seem like enough of a step down to suddenly allow that area to be soloed.

Yeah, we probably should’ve stopped here like half a dozen posts ago…