Editing Dungeons & Dragons Online (section)

==The Basics==
It's an MMORPG (duh) where you can create a D&D character ([[derp|extra duh]]) and fight monsters without the hassle of [[butthurt|whiny DMs]], [[Railroading]], or [[rules lawyers]].  [[Powergamer|Powergaming]] is a fact of life, and the in-game economy has long since collapsed due to high-level items being easily grindable and the Haggle skill being easily twinked.

While it may take a while for new players to build up to the fantastically obscene amounts of wealth required to buy or trade with older players, the game itself is very diverse.  Almost anything available in [[RPG|pen-and-paper]] D&D is achievable, though characters are limited in their interactions with the environment (walk on it, jump on it, climb on it, or break it).

The game is freemium, meaning you can technically play for free but it goes much faster if you pay for stuff.  Instead of using just straight-out money, you first have to buy DDO points (buying them in-store opens up a Premium account though).  Points are then used to buy items.  For those of you too cheap or poor to pay with real money, you can earn points by gaining favor with [[NPC|NPCs]] or finishing special quests.  Points are set to the account in use, so building a couple of characters, earning the points, then buying more character slots and starting them all over is a viable and much scummed tactic.

The main drawback is that it doesn't have ''everything'' quite yet, and since it's run by a computer you can't ignore the rules.  Also, as previously stated, environmental interactions are very limited.

Unlike your average MMOs, where level caps are meaningless, DDO's character levels end at 20, at which point your character building is over. Over the years, they have added Epic Levels, which is now going up to as much as level 32, however starting with level 21, you are transitioned over into Epic character building. You no longer get points to put into the skill trees that you had used through level 1-20 and instead have to work with a new set of skill trees tailored for very high level characters.

To appease the Min/Maxers and metalords, the devs added multiple incentives to reincarnate your character after having reached the max level. Reincarnating gives access to exclusive past-life feats, extra points at character creation and other obnoxious win-harder stuff.
While this may please the cancerous power gamer cash cows, it has notoriously been responsible for grinding the Public Group social tab into a halt, as the players using reincarnated (often not once but dozens of times over reincarnated) characters would blast through dungeons at breakneck speeds and act like impatient, elitist assholes when a normal player holds them back in the rare moments when their godlike characters needed help to progress in a dungeon, ruining the experience for players who are new or who prefer to make alts instead of reincarnating their characters.

As a result, DDO is a largely private experience, with people either playing solo (entirely viable, so long as you don't mind missing out on raids), checking the game out with their friends or joining a private guild and co-ordinating their playtimes. The drop-in, drop-out aspect of the game has been practically dead since ~2013. This is also a sensitive topic on the game's official forums. Criticism of DDO's biggest pay-pigs, the Reincarnation players, is a surefire way to get you banned eventually, yet the elephant in the room is that if these players didn't destroy the public grouping experience, DDO may very well have stayed way more relevant over the years. Still, the game is alive and kicking after 15 years, so they must be doing ''something'' right, though the monetization has become increasingly more cut-throat over the last few years, so the pay-pigs may be starting to lose interest.