I think it was pretty fast, and an appropriate response. The wall came down. They said the words "we apologize".

I hope they don't make the same mistake twice, or allow any other major goof-ups like this to take place. I want to keep playing this game for a long time to come, and more mistakes like that could be fatal to the game.

Search is promised for this year. Finally. There have been bug fixes with the monthly updates - mass heal was just fixed last week.

They appear to be trying and making progress. I would expect to see more this year, since the extra revenue from going Free to Play has only started to appear in the past 6 months, and it takes time to ramp up development.

Ideally, Turbine's goal should be to extract as much money from premium players like me as they obtain from VIPs. There are two ways to do this, but only one keeps me in the game.

So far, the Turbine store contains mostly perks that are not necessary to enjoy the game. If that changes, and I need to spend real-life money to buy items to play the game, I'm gone. However, if they release compelling new content like the best of the existing packs (Desert, etc), I'll keep spending.

The DDO Forums damn-near literally exploded yesterday over this issue. Turbine got the message loud and clear, and saw that people were ready to vote with their wallets.

I don't expect altruism from a corporation, but I expect someone with my credit card information to be trustworthy, and to partner with trustworthy firms. This is a huge step in the right direction, and is helping restore my confidence in Turbine.

I would suggest that the typical Facebook user is quite different from a typical DDO player. Most of the people in my guild are in their 30's or older, many are very tech savvy. Compare that with Facebook, where the typical user wouldn't even understand how they are being compromised by those offers.

Learn to read then. From the DDO site, emphasis added:

There were also technical issues that raised valid questions about security. Overall it was a poor user experience that was not up to our standards, and for this we apologize.

Sure, I would have phrased it differently, but you can bet that the corporate drone who approved this debacle in the first place died a little inside even thinking about those words.

While not a perfect apology, it is good enough for me.

Other ways to pay? Certainly. But nothing should have been sent to the scammers just from viewing a page hosted on Turbine's site. That was a severely bad implementation problem. The other problem was Turbine associating with a company like SuperScamSpamRewards in the first place.

There are 3 type of account on DDO. VIP is a regular monthly subscription that gets access to all content and most account features, along with 500 Turbine Points each month. Free to Play pays nothing, can access a good subset of content up to around level 12 (level 20 is the cap). F2P players can grind and earn Turbine Points by playing (somewhere around 25 turbine points per hour I believe) with which they can also buy content packs. Premium players are F2P players who have bought Turbine Points, or VIPs who let their subscription lapse.

During PAX, there was a sale on DDO of almost 7000 Turbine Points for $50. Since most content packs range from around 250 to 1000 Turbine Points (the best ones come on sale for 500-750 points every few months), that is enough to keep a casual gamer like me busy for many many months. You can't find value like that on many other MMOs.

Thank-you Turbine, for bringing down the Wall so quickly in response to customer concerns, and for apologizing to DDO players. That helps immensely.

Apologies are few and far between these days, and it is refreshing whenever a corporation actually says they are sorry.

I enjoy playing DDO, and I hope that the apology will help mitigate the harm to the game caused by this incident, and I also hope that the game population will continue to grow.

Turbine has announced that they are dropping the wall, and they also apologized to their players.

That only took a day or so from when the Offer Wall was introduced, which is reasonably fast by corporate standards.

Thanks Turbine, for listening to the players, and for the apology. You make a great game, and I hope to continue playing it well into the future.

Full text of the announcement:

Turbine’s slogan is “Powered by Our Fans." That means more than just words to us. It’s a promise. We pride ourselves on listening closely to you, our players, and working with you to do what’s right.

Turbine is continually looking for ways to stretch the boundaries of pricing and commerce models in our games. That’s the kind of thinking that lead to Founder’s pricing in LOTRO and the launch of Free-to-Play in DDO. We’re always focused on providing the best possible value to the widest group of players, but not if it compromises our relationship with our fans.

Recently, we opened an Offer Wall with a selection of ads that got a strong negative response. There were also technical issues that raised valid questions about security. Overall it was a poor user experience that was not up to our standards, and for this we apologize.

Based on your feedback, we’re stepping away from the ‘Offer’ category for now. We’ll keep exploring alternate ways for players who want points to get them. We’ll also continue to innovate in pricing and accessibility because that’s who we are. As of today, the Offer Wall is coming down. We’ll collect all the feedback we’ve received over the last few days and will use it to guide future decisions.

Finally, there was a lot of speculation about how information such as your username or e-mail address was being used by our commerce partners. Ultimately we chose to pass the e-mail address to our commerce partners in the URL to facilitate e-mailing receipts to players. It went no further than that. Neither PlaySpan nor Super Rewards passed the information on. It was stored in the user database only and not transmitted to any of the companies who advertised via Super Rewards. Players who visited the page did not expose any new information to PlaySpan (our in-game store provider) that they did not already have.

Even though this implementation did not constitute a technical breach of our privacy policy, we certainly understand the concerns that have been communicated to us and how seriously players take their privacy. As a result, the Super Rewards team has already removed the e-mail addresses from their user database. If we decide to return to the Offer category in the future we will certainly work with our partners to implement a better system than the one we tried this week.

Your calculations need to look forward as well. I have over $50 in Turbine Points (non-tradeable currency that can only be used in the Turbine store to buy adventure packs and account features) just sitting there waiting to be spent. I can now play all of the best content in the game until the servers are shut down without spending another penny. I've been playing for six months so far, and in another six months, the cost of my own account ($130) will be less than $11 per month, and dropping. Unless they release enough compelling content that I end up burning through my stockpile, I might be able to get my average spending into the $5-8 a month range in 2011. Since I've been buying content on sale as I go, and have not even entered most of the mid-high level content I bought (Gianthold, Vale of Twilight, etc), I fully anticipate that I might finish 2010 with what I've already bought.

The cost of F2P can really add up for people who want some of the optional stuff from the store, like trinkets that improve the loot from chests, character rebuilds, or potions that increase XP earned by 20% for a few hours. Apart from a shared bank and an additional character slot, I only spend money on adventure packs. Here is a guide to playing for "free", written by a gamer. It is theoretically possible to play without spending a penny, but I have more money than time. So far I have found it well worthwhile, and I really like Turbine's model with the exception of this latest act of stupidity.

Two accounts, and I wasn't planning on sinking any more money in until this fall at the earliest. My goal was to keep my own account between $10-15 per month, and I'll be back on track shortly. I have $50 worth of points just sitting in my account, waiting for sales on the content that I haven't already purchased. The "lure in new players" approach worked quite well. The problem is, so did more recent approach of "piss them off by associating with internet marketing scumbags".

I have watched my brother-in-law play WoW and many other MMOs, and they don't appeal to me at all, with the cartoony graphics and gameplay. The only thing that got me playing was the connection to something I enjoyed playing 20 years ago. When I stop playing DDO, I'll probably go back to Freeciv.

Turbine's in dire financial straits. I have no insider information, but it's pretty obvious.

Obvious to who? There have been regular updates to DDO on schedule since going free to play, and their revenue went up by 500% since going free to play. The number of subscribers has doubled, and I don't think that even includes the pay-to-play people such as me, who spend as much or more each month on buying content packs as a subscriber would. As long as they keep releasing content, they'll keep the revenue stream alive from people like me.

LOTRO is the second most popular US MMO, and it has some great expansions, including the new Moria one that just came out... It's like World of Warcraft only done *right*. But that's not going to last, for the same reason AC and DDO died.

{princess bride}Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.{/princess bride}

DDO went free after it slowly decayed. It's probably on the downswing from that huge influx right now.

Don't think so. But then, why look for real numbers when you can just spout FUD and pull stuff out of your ass.

What Turbine needs to do is make a new "boxed collection" every 6 months and sell it in stores for $20. That would keep the new players flowing in and might -- MIGHT -- save them.

You might not have heard, but brick and mortar games stores already have a few nails in the coffin, and could soon go the way of the arcade, the video store, and the buggy whip manufacturer. Ever heard of Steam?

And I have no doubt this spyware thing is a misunderstanding or exaggeration of the facts.

Just by viewing a page on a Turbine site, DDO players have confirmed (by inspecting packets) that the account name and email address were transmitted from the "Offer Wall" page. Add the pre-fetching comment here, and you might be able to see the problem. Sure, my password and credit card were not transmitted, and I only browse with NoScript, but I am probably not representative of the most vulnerable portions of the player base.

The last time I played D&D was over 20 years ago. The rules have changed significantly since AD&D (DDO is based on 3.5), and none of the minutia remained in my memory.

I didn't have a detailed pre-existing mental picture of how the game should work when I downloaded it last year and started playing. Instead, the game met and exceeded my hazy recollections, and then some. I don't have to use my imagination for the video game version, but the convenience of assembling a group, the ability to play anytime, and the variety offered by the character building and development process made it a very fun experience for me. Having a consistent DM who didn't entirely suck (my experience in the past) also helped.

I can relate to your experience. I only ever made it half-way through the first LoTR movie before turning it off in disgust, and will never watch the rest, or the remaining movies by Peter Jackson. I had read the books so many times that the movie was an immense let-down. It didn't even come close to the story as pictured in my mind, and I chose to remain with my mental images of Middle Earth, rather than somebody else's bastardization.

Due to the outcry from their customers, Turbine has taken the Offer Wall down while they sort out the issues that arose due to the half-assed broken way they implemented this lame idea.

I am probably part of the target audience they hoped to attract when they went free to play - someone who hadn't played an MMO before, who had played a bit of pen and paper way back when, and who has disposable income that they are willing to spend if the game is fun enough. So far, it has worked well - I have spent $200 on the game in the past five months on my account and my son's account.

I don't want to deal with a company that I cannot trust, or leave my credit card information in their hands. I absolutely do NOT trust lowlife criminal scum like SuperRewards, and by extension, I do not trust any company that has any dealings with them whatsoever. That means you, Turbine.

I know better than to take any of those offers, but Turbine royally screwed up in their implementation. Even viewing the list of offers on the Turbine site meant that my email address and account name for login was likely transmitted to those parasitic bottom-feeders.

I'll still be playing the game as I bought a ton of content that I have yet to explore, but I will be getting Turbine to remove my credit card info from their billing system if this isn't fixed, and a formal apology issued to their customers by next week. I seriously love this game - it is a ton of fun, many of the players are older, and I don't have to worry about most forms of griefing or PvP emphasis that has kept me away from the entire MMO genre so far. I get to explore instanced dungeons in a small group, and have only explored less than a quarter of the content.

Time to turn the heat up to eleven - DDO players haven't killed it for good yet, or received a formal apology for this privacy breach. Group seppuku by the PHBs who thought up this scheme would be an entirely acceptable response at this time, and would go a long ways towards restoring confidence in the company.

Further update from Turbine's Community Relations Senior Manager:

http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p=2893059&postcount=116

"We’re currently investigating the reports of privacy concerns with our new Offer Wall. That feedback has been escalated to our partners for deeper investigation. Until that investigation is complete we’ve taken the Super Rewards option out of the Offer Wall. We’ll let you know when we have more information!"

http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p=2893072&postcount=123

"That is the only answer I have for you at this time - until we have more information (and we're actively pursuing it), we're taking the Offer Wall down. I'm sorry I don't have anything more concrete than that yet!"

Time to turn the heat up to eleven - we haven't killed it for good yet, or received a formal apology. Group seppuku by the marketing department and PHBs who thought up this scheme would be an entirely acceptable response at this time.