The Daily Grind: Are you checking out DDO?

This is definitely the best free to play MMO out there, even with the locked-out pay content, simply because the combat and level design is head and shoulders over everything else. I am playing for free right now, and it's beaten out the plethora of other games on my PC as the sole stealer of my time.

Even if you have to pay a subscription to rent or permanently buy some of the larger content, paying the subscription just makes it the best pay to play MMO instead. :D Even if you consider this game a trial, it is still the single best game trial EVER, seeing as you get to play indefinitely and really try the game system.

DDO:U is a five star experience. Ddo store and free to play are going to be huge. I'm thrilled to see my favorite game leading the way in this new mmo space!

Well, I've put up Polish D&D Online Portal (http://ddopl.com). Can you imagine, that while this game is 100% English and US version, we have more than 50 users in less than 2 weeks?

Our guild is booming as well. Nothing short of amazing, it's quality just defends itself. But yeah, I'd love if they made UI look more modern - that's the only issue with graphics. When you press alt-z (disable UI), the game looks like well developed single player game, graphically! Not MMO, which have usually simpler graphics than those in DDO. Plus, they've VERY scalable for slower computers - dozens of options to choose from.

About getting Turbine Points for doing quests. Yes, like many wrote here, you get them. And it's funny, because Turbine _intentionally_ gave big, 50 Turbine Points reward for completing 3 first quests!

In other words, you can do those 3 quests, delete this character, do them again, and you have 100 TP. Then do it again and again, and you can earn TP pretty fast. All because they've designed it that way, that's no exploit!
When you delete any character, all Turbine Points stay on your account. Plus, Favor (the same as Faction Points in WoW) is _per-character_. So if you have plenty of character slots and play different characters, all Turbine Point rewards for accumulating Favor... accumulate as well. All characters add to this one, account-wide pool.

About leveling beyond level 4th. Well, I have yet to see a person who didn't get Leveling Sigil allowing to level to 8th, before they hit their 4th lev (first cap). It's really easy to get one, especially knowing which quests give those - usually the longer or more epic ones.
The deal with getting 100% free leveling sigils is that you choose it as a reward for completing a quest. You have many options - weapons, armors, wands, other equipment, and among those items you can find leveling sigil. And you can take only 1 reward for every quest (plus the loot you got from the quests themselves!), so it's a fair trade. Either you take lev. sigil or some good item, if you got to chose one from those random rewards. But, you can take sigil and repeat the same quest for the loot, so that's not much of a problem.

So is it possible to play 100% free? Sure. But it takes much more time, and you should be wise with what you buy. I'd recommend characters slots, because that way you'll have more characters to give you Turbine Points for their questing.

PS: Game is SO popular now, that Turbine servers got flooded on 9th and yesterday. There was some (acceptable) lag in game, but ddo.com website got off-line more than 2 times, heheh. They did maintenance probably to fine-tune the load or add more servers to handle it. Otherwise, the game is smooth and starting locations look like they're under siege :D.

The game forces you to repeat each quest many times per character and forces you to do so with a group of other people who are at various stages of the same repetition. If you are good at the quest you've already done 100 times many people will dislike you, for ruining their fun, and the developers may even implement features to thwart you in the same quests you've already done over and over, instead of creating new content to challenge you.

At end-game you are forced to run raids 20, 40, 60, 80, 100 times to get the gear other people have, and you do so with people who have already done it 100 times and have everything they need.

On top of this the game thoroughly encourages you to make new characters and do all of the above again on another character.

That's fine, it's part of the grind, but to punish people for it is ridiculous. The game needs more content, not increased ridiculous restrictions on the same old content.

Scrap that crap world. Make a big, anime style Forgotten Realms(open to Greyhawk) and get your crap together. Stop with the fail.

I've started this game since the Free to Play launch and have 2 level 4 characters thus far. Each one has the leveling sigil and thus have a level cap of 8 already. They don't use the sigil as a bait and switch. It's readily available as part of what you'd be doing anyway.

The game itself is deep, very deep, and it's easy to be overwhelmed going in if you're not familiar with AD&D to some degree.

While you're initially limited to 2 characters, realize that that is 2 characters per server, so you can roll most of the classes you want to explore by simply switching servers until you find the one you want to stick with.

I obviously can't speak for the end game experience. That's generally where most MMO's seem to drop the ball. But rolling in as a new character I fully endorse.

The game is pretty, well polished and engaging. See you in game.

no mac version :(

i've used windows for decades, I'm not going to sully my macbook with that filth