Catering to Subscribers and F2P in DDO

While all of this Rift stuff has been going on, DDO had its fifth birthday party.  The shindig introduced a new pirate-themed world event, featuring an original quest in which players lead a party of comic NPC kobold miners in search of crystals and adventure.  I didn't really feel like taking the time this weekend, so I logged in for long enough to redeem my pirate hat voucher and stick it in my bags for future upgrading.

(The sheer amount of work that went into this event makes its eventual return pretty much certain.) 

Judging from the coverage on DDOCast and DDO Cocktail Hour, there are a few interesting things about this event.

• As Tipa observed, this is still a free to play game, and the event was accordingly designed to invite cash store purchases.  I don't know if it was mandatory to pay to play, but it certainly sounds like the podcasters spent some Turbine Points on the festivities.
   
• Perhaps more troubling, the DDO store recently got cosmetic armor skins that could be applied over lackluster armor to improve its appearances.  Predictably, people were underwhelmed by the appearances of the event armor. 
  
  
• Unlike the Mabar event last fall, this event added a scaling quest (the Kobold mining event) that actually awards exp.  For the most part, DDO does not hand out exp just for killing mobs indiscriminately, so this was a welcomed change.

The last point is potentially interesting and problematic because a big part of the premium business model is that non-subscribers need to pay for level-appropriate content to obtain the exp needed to reach the cap.  To the extent that players are able to get in without paying (which I can't judge, because I didn't try), having an event that awards exp at any and all levels could cost Turbine a lot of money.  As a result, this particular bit of fun and unique content will need to be locked away in the vault, only to emerge when the sales of festival goodies outweigh the potential losses in sales of leveling content. 

Beyond this specific event, the content scaling issue impacts Turbine in each and every patch.  Longtime subscribers generally want new content that scales for their high or max level characters.  Newer players often have a need for more low to mid-level content (though really the low levels are pretty well covered at this point).  One suggested solution has been to have content that is more flexible on level ranges, and now we finally have a quest that can scale from level 1 to level 25... but it can't stay in the game without breaking the business model.  It's going to be interesting to see whether attempting to run two business models at once has painted Turbine into a corner on this issue.