Getting the Bang for your Buck? By Shayalyn

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Dungeons & Dragons Online is a fun game. No, I mean it! I know this is FriEd, and I'm supposed to be writing an angry rant (never fear, the rant part comes later), but I can say this without shame or fear of reproof--DDO is fun.

But you have to know how to make it fun. For now (until new solo content is added with July's Twilight Forge module), soloing is not the path to fun. What makes DDO fun is grouping; and not just any grouping, but grouping with friends, at least whenever possible. There's nothing like getting together with a group of regulars--your perma-group, if you will--to tackle dungeons. It's in those rare cases that DDO shines.

The groups I see truly enjoying themselves in DDO are the ones who've formed close alliances. We have one such group in our guild. They phone each other to coordinate play times (even though they didn't know one another before DDO launched), and they take along guild members whenever there's a hole in their team. Occasionally they snag some poor soul off the streets and initiate him or her into the joys of grouping with their well-oiled machine. As one of the guild members sometimes adopted into their fold, I can say that dungeon diving with these folks is almost always more fun than should be legally allowed.

But not everyone has a perma-group. Not everyone has a guild that works together and tries for guild group opportunities before seeking out pick-up groups (PUGs). And the odds are good that, even if you could assemble a perma-group, you wouldn't be able to find people who play as often as you might want to. This leaves you either stuck with PUGs (which can range anywhere from inspired to downright awful, with the latter being a good bit more prevalent), or playing less frequently.

It's the “playing less frequently” option that seems to be winning out with many players lately. Without the ideal conditions for fun, the incentive to log into the game begins to wear thinner and thinner. Judging by Turbine's recent bid for more mass market appeal (adding solo content; beginning to develop PvP content), it seems as though the player population may be thinning, too. Why? Because if your opportunities for fun are limited, and you don't feel compelled to play as often as you once did, you're unlikely to want to continue paying nearly $15 a month for your game subscription.

So, now we come to the crux of the problem. Yep, DDO can be fun, but the fun times can be hard to come by. When players aren't necessarily assured a good time as their reward for logging into DDO, they tend to play less frequently. When you play less frequently, it becomes difficult to justify paying a high subscription fee. The end result? Account cancelled; game abandoned.

There are certainly ways to make DDO fun, but in the meantime, while you're trying to pull together those ideal conditions (which aren't necessarily easy to come by), the game simply costs too much for many people to maintain if they're not going to be playing it on a regular basis.

Take a look at Guild Wars, a game that, much like DDO, has common areas and instanced missions. There's actually no subscription fee to play. None at all. And it's okay to play Guild Wars sporadically, or when the conditions are right...because the monthly upkeep doesn't cost a cent. In an all-instanced game with a limited amount of content (sound familiar?), Guild Wars has set a subscription standard that players have now come to expect. You might argue that, unlike Guild Wars, Turbine is dedicated to adding regular free content--but is it enough?

Bottom line: based on what's offered in the game, DDO costs too much on a monthly basis to play. Still, I find it very unlikely that Turbine will see fit to lower the game's monthly subscription fee. It would appear they're doing the next best thing--adding more content to appeal to more players (although to my mind, the jury's still out on PvP). Let's just hope, for our game's sake, that it's not too little, too late.

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