DDO was a load of fun when I played it, it reminded me Phantasy Star Online, but set in Eberron. Anyways, I've been back a few times, always had a lot of fun and never had a hard time grouping up... but it just didn't keep me tuned in for some reason. It also kind of seemed like Turbine just gave up on it, I dunno. Anyways, if you like grouping and action, you can't go wrong with DDO.

Originally posted by Zoobi

It's because there's very little longevity to the actual gameplay. Once you've taken a toon to max level there's very little in the game to keep you there. Some people enjoy making more toons and seeing what variations the character development throws up, but generally, all there is to do after running a dungeon once is to try and set a new time record for completing the quest.

This game is powergamer central.

I couldnt disagree more...

I have been playing DDO for two years... Yes I play other MMO's but my heart is and probably always wil be in stormreach. I dont believe this game is "Powergamer Central" of course there are some players like this, but I am positive the same can be found in any MMORPG, and in fact remember reading an article about some crazy power gamer in wow who played continuously to reach the highest lvl possible... to the detriment of his health.

You talk about longevity as if every other game has longevity and it is mutually exclusive to all games but ddo... this is incorrect.

NO GAME can cope with the level of demand that is bound to be put upon it by an ever evolving player base... it is human nature to want more more more, more quests, better graphics, more enthralling environments.. no development team in the world can keep up with the myriad of wants. 

You play stormreach to the 16 cap it is currently at, you have completed all the quests upto elite dificulty and have all the best items/loot etc. Your character is a gargantuan amongst toons. You are basically unwilling to roll another toon to take that one through the lvls, and now need to wait until the new mod / level cap raises to 20.

how does this differ from other games.. it doesnt, people who play these games all rush to hit cap in whatever game they are playing, then have to wait for new content... longevity only really exists as a concept.. yes you may say requiem or WOW have longevity, but walking round killing spiders and desert goblins is hardly a advertisement for enthralling gameplay.. running from one end of the map to the other to deliver a note which will then mean you have to run all the way back to the start to gain 3.6% xp and a miniscule amount of loot is hardly inspiring.

DDO as a game is a constantly improving entity... if the european advertisement was better and if it was more readily available in the shops then we would probably be more popular.

DDo is a great game, and I would suggest playing for a month until you decide either way whether the game is for you.. and hell, if its not, it doesnt matter.. everyone is unique and desires different things out of their entertainment.

Perhaps I did not make myself clear. I mostly enjoyed my time in DDO, levelling up a wizard to the level cap, taking a fighter to level 10, a cleric to level 11 and a rogue to level 8. However, my enjoyment did depend on me insisting on a "no rushing" playstyle from the other members of the party I was in. If the other members of the party acted otherwise, as is common and an expected way of playing this game, I would find myself lagging behind, basically in a foot race with them to complete the adventure. I understand why "rushing" (a term that I was taught in this game and I'm no stranger to MMOs) is an acceptable way of playing, but in this MMO in particular it just murdered it for me. People rush through the adventures because they have completed them many, many times before. Rogues have no need to look for traps as parties, en masse, run upto the traps and tell the rogues to "hurry up and disarm ffs". Unless, of course, they are tanks with large HPs and the dungeons are set to a lower diffculty, in which case they plough through them expecting heals or consuming vast quantities of heal pots. Wizards and sorcerors are "haste bots", there to cast the spell haste which helps speed the whole tortuous affair of playing in a group with someone up. Add rushing to the twinking, which is rampant, and you get situations in adventures which are totally against the vision that this MMO portrays, ie a version of the table-top game online. Parties are made to complete the adventures in the smallest amount of time as possible with next to zero consideration to group play. This is what I mean by powergaming. Seeing as this style of playing is the norm in this game, I think "Powergamer Central" is a fair assessment of it.

With regard to the longevity of the game. Yes, you are correct in that any MMO will have longevity problems, which are addressed in various ways by different MMOs. DDO's way of addressing this problem is by the introduction of a very limited crafting system which requires you to grind raids to complete. Also, to unlock 2 options in character creation and other benefits in game, DDO has "favour points"; you get favour by completing adventures - the harder the adventure the more favour you receive. To unlock the harder level of advetures per toon, you must complete the adventure on the easier settings. This encourages you to seek to complete adventures many times and if you make more than one toon, well you can see where I'm going here. Also, the much vaunted character creation, with its large amount of character customisation, is another way in which players find more longevity in this game. However, this compounds the need to grind out the adventures which encourages "rushing". So, when I compare DDO's solutions I find the on par with most other MMOs and I'm left with the actual gameplay to keep me paying for the game and as I outline earlier, I find this lacking and hence the longevity, for me, is reduced.

The most fun I had in this game was in my last couple of weeks in this game when I made a permadeath paladin, a character I would delete if he died and so forcing some interesting ingame choices on the play. However, making this character did finally convince me to give up playing even though it was the most fun to play. It convinced me to cancel my subscription because the biggest factor governing the character's chances of survival in the adventure was whether the party it was in was a powergaming party or not and I spent the vast majority of my time on this toon looking for a group that valued group play.

Now dont get me wrong. I think this game is a groundbreaker with regard to the mechanics of combat and so well worth a look by all PC gamers. This game is, in my opinion, is years ahead of other MMOs even the ones released this year and in the foreseeable future when you consider how combat is handled. I do, however, stand by my claim that this game is "Powergamer Central" and of reduced longterm appeal.
 

Now I understand your definition of Powergamer... then i will admit that there is a lot of that in DDO, and the majority of groups are as you say obsessed with completing quests as quick as possible in there desire to get to the higher lvl quests, or just because they have ran them a million times before.  i feel a little sad in retrospect that you hadnt quested with me and my closest friends in stormreach because we as a guild, as a whole enjoy questing at a slower pace and with more regard for the more "Questing is fun, lets enjoy the quest" type of player.

Yes I have capped loads of toons over the time i have been playing, but I still like to "Play" a new toon and when I do I try and play as if I havent done it a million times before.

As for twinking (sending stuff from your highbie to your lowbies) our guild have groups setup on monday, wednesday, and friday which are semi rigid in there rules.. the only class allowed to send stuff to there lowbies are for the clerics in the groups. and usually this is limited to 10,000gp which equates to 20 cure light wands, or 10 cure mod wands.. just to give him a little start.

Twinking isnt a major problem at high lvl, as the uber crafted weapons from the shroud are bound to the character that created them, it only becomes a problem at low lvl or in a rush group or as i like to call it.. the "Non Stop Quest Express" who are 2nd lvl and fully armed with +1 ele weps of pure good Race restricted.. and everytime a kobold or low lvl creature looks at the weapon they just fall over on the spot.. eg: +1 Acid Dwarf Axe of Pure Good RR:Dwarf RL:2 (1d6 Acid Damage + 1d10 Physical damage + 1d6 good damage = Non Critical Max Damage = 22HPS, Critical Max Damage = 66HPS all to a Kobold that has at most 8hps on the normal 24hps on hard and 32 - 56hp's on elite.. so in that respect you can find over powered players who like to rush.. and I am not saying there arnt a lot of them.. but there are groups out there like mine that like to take there time and play for fun..

Not sure if you were referring to EU or US servers btw.. :)

I spent my time on Keeper, an EU server.

I think one of the main reasons I quit is because it just didn't live up to my expectations.  It was pretty much a REALLY watered down version of what PnP D&D is and the instancing drove me nuts after a while.  You don't get the feeling that Stormreach is really that "big" of a city but rather 6-8 smaller cities all connected together by "tunnels" that you have to go through (i.e. load the instance) just to get to.

Did that make sense?

Anyway, good game as an appetizer or secondary MMO, but not enough content to keep me interested past 2-3 months.

You are right, the combat is EXCELLENT, however, in most situations, the mobs are way underpowered making the challenge pretty much 0 if you are playing with vets or moderate gamers. 

On the other end of the spectrum, if you're all noobs and no one knows whats going on, it's extremely frustrating to try to get through some of the dungeons. 

In short, too many instances, not enough content for my tastes.

Originally posted by tp1hobss

Originally posted by ricefarmer

ive been looking for an mmo that has this type of gameplay and thought it coudln't exist!

i thought spellborn was the answer but dam those characters are ugly...

is it because of the heavy instances that this combat is possible? if it is why the hell would people complain if it means no more mindless point and click....

I don't understand why people dislike this game so much.  I actually love it...it was my warm cuddly bed when WoW lots its taste.

I'll tell you why I don't like the game. I can't say and won't pretend like my opinion is everyone elses though. As a long time D&D dungeon master, I feel like I'm paying $15/monthly for a slightly advanced guild wars. Slightly advanced, because I can jump, and use the 3.5 ruleset. Everything's instanced. There's no feeling of freedom, as they broadcasted during the alpha stages of development. And since everything's instanced, I found it hard to meet up with new players. The original team was sent over to LoTRO DURING development, which greatly inhibited the workflow. They promised no PvP, then got caught on an alpha testers vid from one of their booth presentations saying that PvP would be happening later.

There are some neat things in DDO, like free updates. No item mall crap, etc. But it's still not worth that $15 a month to me. I play GW. I think it's worth the $40 I paid for it, since I can play whenever I want to. I don't think it would be worth $15/monthly. When we were testing, a guy kept crying about how it should be free, and I shrugged it off, till I realized what he meant. It's the same feel as a higher quality F2P game.

HI all when I first heard of this game I was so much looking forward to it I liked the art style also but When i actually started to  play.

I Just didn't like the feel of the city at all like many have said the game feels to confined very small world,  at least in the begging and why in the hell did they pick the Eberron setting I have no freaking clue out of all the d&d settings! hopfully one day we will get a really awseome d&d mmo in a better setting.

Originally posted by Windlion

HI all when I first heard of this game I was so much looking forward to it I liked the art style also but When i actually started to  play.

I Just didn't like the feel of the city at all like many have said the game feels to confined very small world,  at least in the begging and why in the hell did they pick the Eberron setting I have no freaking clue out of all the d&d settings! hopfully one day we will get a really awseome d&d mmo in a better setting.

Eberron was chosen as it was D&D's "Official New Campaign Setting" back then. It was inspired from a user made world, that won a WoTC competition.

I wish they had went through Bioware, or even Bethesda Softworks/Zenimax. D&D is king of the pen and paper world. DDO could have been king of the normal fantasy mmos (not a wow killer, but far more subs than VG, and EQ2).

this game is made in groups. look for good guild. my friends and i created a guild where we know who the people are, personally. it made us create an awesome guild that already went to the top.

YEs i hav eto agree with most post in this thread.  Except for the soloabilty of the game, when DDO was released it was released without the intentions of it being a soloable game.  Turbine got enough complaints about it that they intergrated it into the game at a slow pace.  The game itself was designed to be a group game, not single player.  Powergamers in DDO of course which mmo doesnt have them in their game?  Some of those powerlevlers cant be a bit arrogant and jerks. So what, didnt like them in your group? make a dont group with list and add them to to it. 

  Content is abit scarce for endgame play. I think Turbine needs to add a couple of different citys you can travel to and have adventures on the way and quests in the new citys.

 Are thngs unbalanced in ddo?  Yes somethings are. Again show me one mmo out there that doesnt have balance issues.

   So if your looking for a mmo that is completely soloable DDO isnt going to be for you.  Try WAR that is a very solo friendly game.

 DDO's combat is the best out there to date. No more click abilty attack and wait then click againand wait.

Another thing that is overlooked in DDO is the in game voice chat.  I see wow tried it but i didnt think it was no where near as good as DDO's.  Most mmo's you need vent or that other voice chat hmm cant thik f the name now.  

P.S.  

Please remember that DDO is niche game all to its own.