It’s Dungeons & Dragons Online’s fifth birthday, and Turbine just wants to give back by re-opening Smuggler’s Rest for a few short days. Before DDO acquired the Korthos Island adventure zone, new players would be sent to Smuggler’s Rest to learn the basics of the game before finding themselves in the mean streets of Stormreach.
The newly renovated Smuggler’s Rest is a progression zone of sorts. Players run around the island attacking small groups of pirates, who drop treasure map pieces, rarer special treasure maps to hidden treasure caches, doubloons in three varieties, and very rarely, a Treasure Compass.
Treasure Compasses are very fine little devices – you can use one to get into the extra puzzle zone, Crystal Cove, where you can earn very nice items. But without a compass, you’re shut out entirely.
Of course, you can just buy a compass from a vendor on the ship – for a substantial amount of all three varieties of doubloons. Or you can charge it to your credit card.
It’s possible to farm one from the pirates. Our static Sunday group was one short, with Ulan off vacationing in the Caribbean this week. We decided to take a break from dungeon delving and play in the birthday zone while it was still open. We all got our hats, which are more fine depending upon your playtime. Spode and I got feathered “captain’s chapeaus”, while Gleek sported a soup tureen gravy boat tricorn hat.
With smiles on our faces and stars in our eyes, we set out to explore Smuggler’s Rest.
We died and died and died and died (x100). We’d see soloers in magnificent armor just swoop in and snickety-snack clear a camp and then we’d die in the next one. Though we died a lot, Spode eventually got a couple of compasses. Gleek had been playing in the zone for a few days, and had six. After a couple hours farming and dying, though, I hadn’t found one and had only a fraction of the doubloons necessary to buy one. I was unwilling to spend real money on DDO’s birthday present.
Eventually Gleek and Spode decided to try the zone, so I logged out.
Happy Birthday, DDO!
Don’t invite me to your next one.
Okay, I’m going to rant a little here. I play several MMOs, and I love them all.
Rift is just a solid, fun MMO with a lot of dynamic content, very cool dungeons, awesome rewards, and plenty to do.
Star Trek Online is an MMO that has taken the challenge of continuing the Star Trek TV shows and movies in an MMO form. It’s a story based MMO, and whatever Bioware tells you about SWTOR, STO did a story-based MMO before they did. It doesn’t quite have Rift’s polish, but the stories, oh man… just get better all the time.
Wizard101 is an MMO that took all the usual conventions and tossed them out the window. KingsIsle came out with a game that is actually significantly different from anything that came before, as far as I know.
Then there’s DDO, the Kingdom of the Paywall. Adventure by the buck. It’s a F2P game, of course, and there’s no reason why the good folks at Turbine shouldn’t be paid for their work. I don’t mind that – I am happy to pay for their modules. I think it’s great!
But when they offer a special player event and then decide for no real reason to hide part of it behind a paywall, well… that’s just being mean.