Dungeons And Dragons Online: DDO News: Devspotting

In the tradition of devspotting posts, just a few smaller topics covered on the official forums today:

Organizations
The various factions within Eberron play a pretty large part, as you may expect. Xundau lists a few that we'll see in DDO: Dragonmarked houses, Order of the Emerald Claw, and the Cult of the Dragon Below. I'm sure that's not all of them that we'll be seeing, but it's definitely a good start.

Why no crafting?
As we know, there is no crafting system for release, but Xundau goes into the reasoning a bit more. He makes some good points about the standard pen and paper system not being very balanced for MMORPGs.

What about grappling?

If we put in grappling, we'd want the same level of realism to apply -- we'd want you to see your character tackling the hobgoblin, or the fire giant grabbing you in a huge bearhug. Unfortunately, this isn't something that's easy to do; to put in full-on grappling, we'd have to create grappling animations for every monster/player combination, in addition to dealing with a host of gameplay questions.

Which is to say, it's not in, because it would be extremely difficult to do well and they feel that it might not live up to the standards they've set. Also, I can't say I'd be anxious to get up close and personal with the fire giant he mentions.