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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 href="http://ddo.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=197">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.