Exploring Eberron: Waiter, there's a scrooge in my Festivult!

I'm looking forward to the Festivult events. I love sales, I love the Risia Ice Games (even though I stink at platforming), I love gathering Festivult coins, and I will love it even more once I have a cookie jar to stick all my new goodies in. There's even a giveaway that will award one lucky player 100,000 Turbine Points!

I had fun writing last week's newbie's guide to Festivult, and once it was done, I spent a fair amount of time browsing the DDO site and the forums in preparation for the upcoming events. In the middle of all my holiday fun and anticipation, I noticed something both on the forums and in game: discontent.

Wait, discontent over such a fun event? What's going on here? Who put this anger in my Festivult? Follow along after the jump as I take a closer look.

The Risia Ice Games are returning, and Dungeons and Dragons Online has an advent calendar with a brand-new sale every day! Great stuff, huh? Not so, evidently. I've seen a lot of grousing that the Risia Ice Games are back again, and even more grousing over Turbine's choice to call the sale event an advent calendar. Even the Turbine points sweepstakes was met with anger.

I've seen this sort of thing a lot over the time I've been playing DDO, but there seems to be even more surrounding what is supposed to be a fun and exciting series of events. It set me to thinking, primarily about DDO's community, but also about game communities in general. What responsibility does a developer have to its customer base, and what responsibility do the customers have to the developer?

Technically, there's no legal responsibility beyond the EULA, but a developer obviously wants to keep its customers happy in order to keep that income rolling in. The easiest conclusion to jump to here is that the onus is on the developer to cater endlessly to the customer base, but at some point, that just becomes unreasonable and silly. I feel as if we're skating along the line of "unreasonable and silly" in this case and shoving the fun of Festivult aside in order to find something to complain about.

I want to look at Turbine's 100,000 point sweepstakes event first. When the news was posted in the forum, the very first reply was anger. Further replies went on and on, complaining that it's unfair of Turbine to leave so many people out. In most cases I work to see both sides of the argument, but in this case I just shook my head out of sympathy to Turbine, because here at Massively we deal with the same complaints over and over. There is some sort of strange perception that companies restrict contests out of laziness or malice, when in truth it's simple U.S. and international law. I hate to see a developer taking heat for contest restrictions like this when it's mostly a matter of legal issues. In the spirit of the holidays -- or at any time of the year for that matter -- I'd love to see those who aren't eligible simply be happy for those who are. Happily, I saw a little bit of that. Sadly, it was drowned out by the complaints of unfair exclusion.

Next up, the Risia Ice Games. Ewww, the Ice Games again? We already had them more than once this year! What's wrong with you, Turbine? It's all in the perception. Have we had the ice games before? Yes? Well... so what? To me, that's like complaining that we had turkey last Thanksgiving and we're having it again this year. It's a fun event that we don't get to participate in that often. It's not for everyone; like I said before, I stink at platforming, which makes jumping games a source of major frustration for me, so it's a good thing that participation isn't enforced. When the Ice Games came around last time, I blew some Turbine Points on hot cocoa to save myself some running around, failed spectacularly at the jump for a while, said, "Ugh, I'm terrible at this," and went to find something else to do. The end. I didn't like it any more, so I didn't play it. Simple as that.

Finally, and the most baffling to me, is the out-of-proportion anger at Turbine for the word "advent." I get that the word has a religious connotation. I get what the root of the complaints are. What I don't get is why it's such a huge deal. To me, it's like Turbine said, "Happy holidays! Here is a pile of stuff that includes a gigantic sale, enjoy!" and the playerbase ignored everything in order to find something to complain about.

I understand that religion is a touchy subject, but why is it so difficult to simply say "thank you" and maybe even praise Turbine in the bargain for putting together so many events? Everything surrounding Festivult has been created to avoid a connection with any particular holiday, unless you count Festivus. I never cared for Seinfeld, by the way. Can I be angry and offended that Turbine is "forcing" me to participate in a holiday that has a passing association with something I don't like? (What's that you say? That is completely silly? I think you see my point, then.)

"Advent" is a single word out of hundreds, and the calendar is a single event out of many that Turbine has created to give its players a good time. In a game world where we fight undead, summon monsters, and shoot fire from our fingertips, I don't think Turbine will be hauling us all to church any time soon. I think our religious freedom is safe and nothing awful will happen if we simply thank the developers for their hard work and enjoy the freebies.

This sort of attitude -- these huge complaints about little things -- is unfortunately typical of a large portion of DDO's veteran playerbase, and I hate to see it spoiling the holiday events. Am I being a blind advocate for Turbine? I hope not -- I really try to see both sides of situations and have spoken frankly more than once when things were handled badly -- but in this case my sympathy lies with the company. There is a certain attitude among a large portion of the DDO community that seems to indicate Turbine is bound to comply with every tiny wish immediately, and it leads to discontent no matter what.

It's to be expected in any long-running game community, but it's harder to ignore when it spills over into special holiday events. In the spirit of the holidays, how about we all smile and enjoy the fun. It'll be gone soon enough, so let's take advantage of it while it lasts.

I'll see you next week!

Exploring Eberron is a novice's guide to the world of Dungeons and Dragons Online, found here on Massively every Friday. It's also a series of short summaries of lower-level DDO content, cleverly disguised as a diary of the adventures of OnedAwesome, Massively's DDO guild.