Blackmoor Defenders : Ghallanda

Hard to believe just 30 days ago a lot of the new faces here now....where not here. A lot has changed since March. Our family has grown both in the number of active players... as well as the wealth of knowledge and experience which makes a good family in DDO.

As you all know, I rarely ever say "guild" as I don't think we fit that mold. I truely believe we are a family. We help each other in game... from listening as a friend when a player has real life stuff going on to leveling up our characters, gearing up each other with weapons/armor/stuff, goof on each other for a good laugh, get wiped horribly together and chuckle about it, then try it again... oh, the list goes on. I don't think I need to mention just how much we quest together.

In fact, many of you have mentioned to me that others (not in our 'guild') are shocked to see all of us playing together. I find that sentiment both positive (for us) and at the same time, saddening for the player. My belief has always been we play together, find others who would fit into our 'culture' and welcome them to our family. Nobody should ever feel 'I can't find a good group'. When, all you have to do is say hi in the Blue Text. :)

I know everyone's schedules change over time, and there are some of us gone from the game due to real life issues, but when they return they will get back into the swing of things again.

Anyways, just wanted to say thanks to everyone and as time goes on, looking forward to welcoming and questing with many more new faces.

Well, in talking about this tonight, it looks like this would actually be used now. So... I reactivated the forums.

Create an account, it will notify me, I approve it...and you are in. This way, I avoid all of the PORN VIGRA HOT SEX LOCAL VITAMIN E-STORE crap accounts.

Oh, if you want to mod any of the forums... just IM me on the Forums. Also, if there is a forum you think would be of use, let me know.

We've been busy lately and here are some random screenshots. I missed a lot of them but here is what I do have. We ran these (and more...)

Lately we've been running very decent XP runs for our mid-level toons... Xome and Sparks both need to run either the Necropolis (all in that series) or the Catacombs... both series for Xome and just the Necro for Sparks. I'm not sure if everyone has access to the Necropolis... if you don't... I (or somebody).... can get a guest pass if necessary. I would really like to knock out both series on Elite and be done with the XP / Favor so I can continue to avoid those quests. :)

A couple other areas I'd like us to tackle (or farm....): Offering of Blood in the desert (for Spectral Gloves) and also the Resless Isles. With the Restless Isles, you need to have completed Hidden in Plain Sight. Once we are on the Isles... we quest for the Royal Mask (teleport) and the Ring of the Ancestors (Raise Dead). And while there, get flagged for the Titan RAID.

Took a couple shots of us completing a couple more min-level quest. Fun stuff and welcome Kraker. Another fine addition to our family. I'd suspect we pick up another new member by week's end who I met on the same quest with Kraker. So hopefully that works out too. Anyhow, here's the pics.

These are just some of the quests that we've recently ran the past couple nights.

These were lots of fun, and with the exemplary assistance of our humble Prissycat/Tudacor, we managed to get thru each quest following his sound and sage wisdom. One who also uttered, at the end of each quest, these humble words, "Boy, it was a good thing I was here to help."

The Individual Character Bank (Add 20 Slots) is now available! Upgrade your character's individual bank account with 20 additional item slots of storage space! This stacks with any favor-earned bank space from House Kundarak! This bank slot will persist through lesser, greater, as well as True reincarnations.

IMPORTANT: This only affects the purchasing character's bank and does not affect or upgrade your shared account bank.

So the other night, a bunch of us started the Sorrow Dusk isle quest series... We managed go clear the lower quests out and are ready to move on to the upper area. Just have to meet up to do that hopefully this week. Anyone else want to do a run of this on Elite (for another run for alts?)

Oh... one parting word... sometimes PUGs can be good.... others, well no so much so. With that said, I joined a random group and knocked this quest out. I nearly left the group a couple of times due to massive disorganization, stupid deaths and in general just a bad PUG. But I stuck it out cuz I wanted that Elite done. Now to go back with all of you so that it can be opened on Elite. Oh, the things I do for you guys! :P

I'm sure if the login server wasn't having issues, more of us would have been on Saturday night... but those those of us who did make it in... we decided to do House Favor runs and didn't expect much in the way of XP, but everyone ended up getting some sort of XP, even if it was just a handfull... but more often than naught, it was a couple thousand XP or so each. We also got to get Boguswine and I think Tudacor thru Tempest Spine for their first time experience in the only non-explorer RAID quest.

I think that got Healington his tier 1 House K favor and we got his alt, Trembly who ran a quest too, in as well. I leveled and I think Boguswine did too. Not sure who else did... but in the end everyone made some serious XP. Welp, again, it was a blast to have a great turn out and nice all around chat with everyone in the family. We even made some new friends. :)

* I'm going to try to take more 'kodak moments' for when we do stuff like this. :)

Nice to do some family questing...especially on the day a new Update comes out with the new quests. Anyhow, Just a screenshot to capture the moment. That was fun! Click the image to view it in large view.

I actually posted this on the DDO Forums several months ago, but it looks like Jones Soda is pushing the marketing for this again (got a notice in my Gmail inbox today). Anyhow, somthing fun (and tasty I would guess) to share with the group.

Over the weekend (3/28/2010), and actually in the works for a while now, our family and Chronos Labs have finally merged. Some have been with us for a while, and others we have been grouping with. The end result... a nice match and grouping, as well as respect for one another. With that said, I welcome all of the new faces and look forward to more questing with all of you.

As a side note, there is another guild that may be joining our family. No details on this other than we play with them quite a lot so it is just a matter of time if and when it happens. As always, no pressure from us. It if is meant to happen, great. If not... well, that won't stop us from bugging them to group up for some questing. :)

While I have not heard much on this (has anyone?), I do know that "Guild" will come into a major part of getting the 'cool' stuff from the up-coming Air Ship (Guild Housing). With that said, to my surprise, we just flipped past 100 characters. Nice! I never would have expected to see Blackmoor Defenders hit that number. Looks like we are heading for a good medium to large size guild again in the months to come.

Hi Everyone-

I hope you all had a fun February and that you enjoyed the events and celebrations we had in DDO! A few weeks back, I had promised that after we got done and fully recovered from all our partying (as in festivities, not just grouping for quests), I would return to talk a little about what is coming up for our favorite MMO. Thanks to those of you who submitted questions as requested. I will do my best to address as many as I can here.

Please bear in mind that development is not always predictable, so what we discuss today will represent our best understanding of what we will be able to accomplish this year within our current plans. Some things may have to slip, but you will surely see other additions over the course of the year as well!

So without further ado, let me dive in to some of the details you’re looking for:

Content and Adventure Packs

Creating new stories, places and adventures is one of the things we love to do! So it won’t be any surprise to you that releasing a steady stream of new content is one of the foundations of our plans for DDO in 2010. This year we have committed to releasing 6 content updates to the game. One down, five more to go!

Next up is Update 4. This new adventure pack, “Sentinels” (which a few industrious players already found in our Compendium, and is now available for preview on Lamannia), is slated for April and follows a story line that involves House Deneith, Searing Heights, a new kind of undead and a nefarious band of pirates led by the infamous Captain Tew (usually seen with his beloved pet, Ratty). The adventures start at CR7, and Sentinels will be our first adventure pack to support Epic mode for level 20 characters starting right from the day of its launch!

Other content packs later in the year will involve a fiendish carnival that will visit house Phiarlan and a new Wilderness adventure area that will contain our first quest with underwater combat. These are currently in the thick of development and they are looking really great with beautiful environments and some exciting new monsters. We can’t wait to share them with you later this year!

New Items

We are also working on some cool new types of game items which will offer new features and functionality to our players. One that’s coming soon is an alignment change item which will let players re-spec their alignment on their characters. We have also recently created technology to support a new kind of cosmetic item that will alter your appearance when you equip it, but will let you keep the stat benefits from the last item you had equipped. We have only had time to play with this tech on a few items, but eventually you’ll see us evolve this into a full offering of cosmetic outfits and hats. You may have already seen the hat we released for President’s Day, and we have two fun, themed cosmetic helms coming in April. Which will be most popular, the cute fluffy bunny hat or the evil dire rabbit helm? I have a bet placed on this one – I won’t say on which. Don’t let me down, DDO players!

New Features

In addition to new content and items we are also working on some exciting new features for DDO. The team is currently busy working on some great additions to the guild system that will let guild members work together to earn valuable rewards and rival guilds compete for status on each server. One of the biggest rewards players will work towards is access to an all new guild housing system, which we are implementing in a cool and unique way. Suffice it to say, we think you will really want to be part of a guild that has earned access to this feature! I can’t say much more about it now, but look for more details in the coming weeks.

Many of you asked for status on new races and classes and I am pleased to be able to share a major announcement today. We are actively working on adding another race to DDO: The Half-Orc! Development is moving along well and as of today it looks very likely you will see a large influx of Half-Orcs into the world of Eberron towards the end of this year. At long last you will be able to play that appearance-challenged but awesomely strong character that you have longed to be. Plus 2 bonus to strength? Yes, Please! Now I know what I’m going to True Reincarnate into in my next life for my main.

On the topic of classes, we are still continuing work on new prestige enhancement to fill out all of the current classes. Our approach continues to be to focus on just one or two classes each cycle until we fill these out. I know you want these to all be done sooner but the logistics of testing and balancing the impact on a class is large so this is likely to continue. A few folks asked about Cleric Domains. I don’t have anything to announce for 2010, but I will say that when it gets to be the Cleric class’s turn to get a polish pass, that is when we will consider these types of additions to the class.

We are also working on some new classes for hirelings to let players better fill out their parties with them. Look for Favored Souls and Bards to appear first and maybe another class or two later in the year.

Polish and Fixes

Now, I know some of you are saying, “It’s nice you are doing new things but why don’t you work on reducing bugs in releases and improving those things that are already in the game?” OK, maybe you didn’t all say it quite so politely, but we hear what you are saying.

On this topic, first let me say that we are absolutely committed to making DDO the highest quality free-to-play game on the market. If on occasion we fail to live up to this high standard, we take steps to adjust how we work to make things even better. To this end, I am happy to share with you that we have recently expanded our QA team and we are re-working some of our processes around how we manage testing on our private and public test servers.

We also have lots of highly requested small improvements and fixes in the works and we will get them to you as soon as possible. On the sooner side, we are making Mass Heal work on parties of up to 12 players, making some improvements to weapon sets and fixing some bugs in key maps. Some bigger requests which we also hope to get done this year include adding string search to auctions, improvements to avatar animations and doing a polish pass on ranged combat.

International

In 2010 we will be working to maintain our positive momentum from last year and grow our service to more players both in North America and around the world. A few of you asked about our plans for Europe, and though I can’t announce any specifics, I can say that we are working with our partners to get the new content and business model to our European players as soon as possible. We will share details with you as soon as we can.

We are also evaluating how we can bring DDO to players who speak other languages and live in other parts of the world. The localization and rollout work is likely to take some time, but look for some announcements on this later in the year as well.

A Bigger and Better DDO

So there you have it. We have a lot of great things planned for DDO in 2010! And these are just the things I am able to talk about today. I hope I’ve answered the majority of your pressing questions. I’m sure there are and will be many more, especially about new features and content as they are released throughout the year. Be on the lookout for more dev diaries with details on new features and changes to DDO, and as always we encourage you to keep providing your feedback through our community sites.

2009 was a huge year for DDO! The launch of Eberron Unlimited has brought us a bevy of awards and accolades for how we have successfully brought the free-to-play business model to the premium MMO space. Even more importantly, we are extremely proud of how our community has embraced the new DDO and grown to include millions of players who are now part of our game world. From all of us here at Turbine, I wish to express a sincere thank you for your support.

See you in Eberron!

-Fernando.