f13.net

For both of us playing DAoC, read the patch notes here (http://www.camelotherald.com/more/1662.shtml)

Some of the more notable changes:

So - now you will get buff bots and moneybots!

Just the demonstration of the good possibilities of Mythic. They still have the fastest evolving game world in the market.

Just evolving in the wrong direction.

Hmmm...faster than AC1?

OT...

LEMMYWINKS!!!!!

Yes, you made an example about a game world standing still. Turbine has always worked about a flat growth. New monsters new zones etc.. The game is bigger but still growing horizontally.

If you look at DAoC's patch you'll see that it adds new systems and new features. There's the new levelling system, there's the new experience system for artifacts and there's a new map system. This means that there's a vertical growth. The game improves in all its parts to become a different game. Hopefully better.

AC1 is aimed to simply add content using the same tool. It's about the work of game masters that aren't transforming it, they are simply throwing at it more of the same.

At the end the result is that AC1 will be richer but still equal to its origin, DAoC, instead will transform, growing with the hardware and the work of the team. One will become old no matter how much content you throw at it, the other can keep growing and evolve without feeling its age.

This is still my favorite...



I see this patch as an attempt to address two problems:

1) The pve treadmill required to participate in the endgame.

2) A weak attempt at balancing the populations among servers.

It's not a perfect solution by any means, but I do appreciate the fact that they're trying.  The addition of uninterruptable DA and DS buffs also seems like a good idea, particularly for classes that rely on DA for effectiveness.  Some pet class will find a way to exploit this, I have faith.

The changes in artifact levelling to realms rather than monsters will also help alleviate the EQ feel that came with the ToA expansion.  That and easing the ML's should make them at least a little more accessible to the casual gamer.

It's not weak, it's stupid. The population unbalances shouldn't be solved because they are a gameplay element. As I always suggest, Mythic should use that as a strength, not as a flaw.

They shouldn't solve the issue, they should just made it pertinent to the gameplay, allowing a different way to play for realms that are underpopulated and weaker. There are many, many ways to make the gameplay in an underpopulated realm more fun. Way better than just boosting the realm points and the experience.

Yes, there are MANY better ways to help this situation.  I've just gotten to the point where I'm happy that they're doing SOMETHING.  You know, that's more than some other mmog companies do to attempt to solve serious issues.

Not an excuse. But I can see your point.

I think one of the big problems with DAoC is the time investment needed to play.  I don't want to spend forever and a day to be on an equal footing with everyone else.

I prefer trying out new things, and if the level grind is too great I quit.  Diablo II was fun because I could keep trying out new character types and not have to spend forever leveling (well, 50+ yeah...but most of the time building up a decent build wasn't too consuming).  AC had it, you could solo or group and either way you could get decent exp either way and both types of play were supported.  CoH has it to some degree, but the purple patch hurt that a little bit (I still think it is fun, but it seems to have slowed down a lot).

I do think it is great that they are finally admiting that they fucked up by making the level grind so freaking long that no one wants to move or start new characters.  Is it enough for me to resubscribe?  Hell no, not unless they make it so you get to level 50 in 2 weeks max of casual play (no more than 1.5 hours a day!) and can compete at a semi even level.

If not, I'll stick to Planetside and CoH.

Jimbo, the issues are two:

1- There's an endgame where most of the players are that is accessible only after level 50 and something more.

2- The treadmill to arrive there is about boring and empty gameplay.

They solved both of these by speeding up the levelling and allowing to PvP from level 1.

At this point there's no reason to reach the top since the treadmill itself is more appealing than the gameplay you'll have after level 50 with all the bells and whistles.

So, right now, the long treadmill isn't a reason to not play the game. There are better reasons why DAoC sucks. At least pick the right ones.

Artifact changes look good. (though as others have said, what they should have done is made all xp count for artifacts, and specific mobs give lots of bonus artifact xp).

Map changes look good, though not sure how necessary they are (it has been my opnion for some time that it should be completely illegal to sell a PC without *at least* 2 monitors.).

Reducing the pointless grind can't hurt - though stopping at 47 seems a bizarre otherworldly decision. The last few levels are the most broken.

There's also a big increase in the camp bonuses in this patch, meaning you can get double xp for moving around killing instead of camping one spot. This won't do affect anything of course, because moving sufficiently to qualify between kills with daoc slow walk speed will always drop your kill rate by more than 50%, particularly when operating in a group.

Nothing I can see in the patch which makes anything worse than before though - which is unusual. Just a shame some of the items they did include didn't follow through a little further.

Mostly, but there have been gameplay/"system" changes as well. Since the last time I played, they have dropped the Appraise skills (which were just XP factories anyway - you now always identify an item) and dropped in an extra crafting system where you can salvage materials with qualities ranging from 1-7 from items, and use this to alter other items - provided you have enough of the resources. There may be other changes as well that I haven't seen.

AC1 coverage on f13 and that other site is probably so thin simply because it doesn't suck, doesn't have a shitload of bugs and doesn't have fucked-up CS.

Hrose - perhaps you should find someone on the net named Blair.

I think WWIIonline touch him in a bad place once. You could talk with him about how DAOC touched you in a bad place.

I hear talking with others about this sort of thing is healthy.

The camp bonus was either horribly broken or intentionally nerfed. Not only was it not any bigger than it was, withing half an hour the entire lower level of Spindelhalla had no camp bonus whatsoever. Not even a single bonus XP. My bot and I were the only 2 people in the entire dungeon and I have never, ever, ever seen a dungeon MOB have no camp bonus, no matter how many times it's been killed.

I actually played at home last night, just to see the new patch. Did the new level 20 quest for a decent magic cloak, then did some RVR.

Yep, still having fun.

The grind comes when you can't get anymore RP's in the battleground you are in, you try to do crafting, or you do PVE in large amounts. PVE in the game is still fairly boring, but you can spice it up by trying to take yellows and oranges instead of tons of blues and greens.

I'll probably do a write up on my return at some point soon.

AC1 coverage on f13 has been so thin because we don't play it. I've never played AC1 and hated AC2. I can't cover what I don't play.

Heh. I wonder if Blair is in a home for the mentally disadvantaged yet? That guy was a loon.

In theory (I've yet to test it), the decay rates have been modified as well.  You used to blow through a camp bonus and get deep into camp penalty pretty fast above-ground with a good group - now it's supposed to be more like dungeons.  This means if you find a good camp that nobody has XP'd at with a high camp bonus, you should be able to sit there and grind away for a considerable net gain than if you found the same camp prior to 1.71.  In theory. ;)



Former.  From today's notes (http://www.camelotherald.com/patches.php?mode=live):

- Fixed an issue where players would not receive a camp bonus for an underhunted area in some situations.

That should fix it.

I suspect you are right about the objective - but I'm not sure what the point is if everyone is still just grinding away at stationary spawn points.

My interpretation of what I've been told by developers is that, basically, the changes are designed to increase XP across the board for all players who are not camping a static site for very long periods of time (specifically targetted - while giving an especially nice bonus to those players who explore proficiently (pull a high-bonus out-of-the-way camp for 30-60min, find another, repeat for mad XP).  

This is also why the renewal rate for a camp bonus gets slower for a heavily hunted camp - ultimately this may actually slow down players who just sit in one spot and powerpull for long periods of time (i.e. a group pulling 15+ mobs every minute for 8+ hours to level a FOTM alt).  I don't like this myself but then I'm one of the people who prefers to just sit in one spot and grind, if I'm gonna grind, because it means easier afk's, can watch TV, etc.

So, in short...  it makes everyone get XP faster except the people who are getting XP pretty damn fast already and are too lazy to move, along with theoretically creating a more common choice of "Do we keep pulling here or move and find another camp?" at some point for each XP group - without it necessarily being "This XP sucks because we pulled for 20min here already."

Oh, what have I done?! I blame Hammy's anus and SB's probing.

I originally thought that this may be a tactic used to deter PL companies like IGE, but I'm probably overthinking the whole thing.  I like the idea of changing camps or hunting at less obvious places.  I've been playing Mid in an underpopulated server and some days the /who 40 - 47 looks identical to /who Spindel while the /who 45 - 49 looks like /who modern.

It's made the game world just a tad larger now that people can't min/max in the same hunting spots.

But this is weak and surpassed and it's another point where WoW is far superior.

In DAoC the camp bonus is supposed to make you move. But why? Simply because they'd like to remove the "grind" impression but the fact is that they are masking the grind, not solving it.

WoW is superior because it pushes the grind inside a story. You level and grind by doing quests. It's obvious that this process is way more involving and fun because it gives to the player a sense of accomplishment. Killing with a purpose inside a story. Killing is consequent to follow a story.

At the same time WoW solves another basic problem: the world. Everyone knows that with more and more expansions the various zones simply become useless because they are constantly replaced by better or more popular "hot spots". This makes the old zones become simply "wasted content" that is worth zero in the game. It means that the game actually looses content instead of offering more. WoW solves this completely because, once again, the quests push the gaming world into a story and each single zone and hot spot has a sense and a purpose inside that story.

So not only you don't grind because you are doing something with a sense, but following this story you are also pushed to visit and explore the world as a whole. And not focused on a precise spot where the "risk vs reward" is maxed out.

Show me on the doll where DAOC touched you Hrose.

Having the budget that Blizzard has and the knowledge of the mmog genre that wasn't available 3 years ago, don't you think they could have done a bit better than this?  

I realize that WoW may be the best thing on the horizon, but it still comes off as pretty disappointing knowing that this is the best we have to look forward to... especially if you consider the resources being piled into it.    Why all the fanbois anyway?  WoW is an improvment, but it certainly isn't the next coming.  

When someone does something revolutionary, then I'll cheer... until then it gets a hearty "meh".

I've even been so kind as to supply the doll.

(http://www.f13.net/images/doll.jpg)

While your at it, can you show us where WoW touched you as well?

I agree. The only difference is that I also like a lot the setting, the style and the engine of WoW. If I keep discussing games, criticizing and all the rest, it's simply because I don't like what the market offers, even WoW.

But at the same time I also observe and comment what is good. This is why in this same thread I've both criticized and praised DAoC.

All good, but I still hold that nobody will ever say "This XP sucks because we pulled for 20min here already."; a maximum modifier of 100% will not make up for the overhead of moving a group, and moving from the best camps with zero bonus, to lesser camps that may have camp bonuses.

Taking alb as the realm I know best. This would never make anyone levelling 43-50 leave Avalon City, and never make anyone take the risk of moving a group between the 5 or so key camp spots for fear of losing their spot.

Of course, it's not a bad change of itself, as it gives people more xp. And people do need to get more xp under any and all circumstances. It just won't do what it appears to be designed to do.

They touched him in the same place, but one used their mouth.

Keep in mind that the camp bonus degrades into a negative penalty (which isn't displayed) at what I believe is the same rate as the positive camp bonus degrades.  So it's not a situation of "There is no bonus here anymore" that gets created by a hardcore powerpulling group, it's a situation of "This XP is crap because we're getting -50% camp bonus" (or more likely it'd be something along the lines of "why are we getting 10mil for these purples we were getting 50mil to start with?").

But yes, personally I don't give a shit about exploration or moving camps or whatever...  I've catassed my way to 50 so many times in each realm that there is very little new or interesting to me...  I just want my f'ing XP, and preferably in such a way that I can chat with friends or watch TV or try to convince my gf over the phone that I'm not actually playing.  So I'm the kind of person that will stick around at a camp until I log, pretty much, regardless of the negative camp penalty.  Other people wanting that adventure get a nice reward though, in theory.

On a side note, after messing around a bit last night, I believe I was mistaken about the decay rates for the bonus changing...  as far as I could tell, camp bonus decays just as fast as it used to, which means above-ground you can go from a huge bonus to a huge penalty in a pretty short grind time.

So can we agree that this idea is another completely useless attempt to fix the game? Because that's what it is. An attempt to piss off even more the players since moving to find a spot is even more boring than staying on a place.

DAoC's PvE has deeper issues.

I wouldn't say it's useless. It certainly helps mitigate the grind for NEW players, and bringing in new blood is important. As an MMOG ages, it becomes even MORE important since burnout drives old vets away.

Will it help population imbalances? Nope, but nothing short of instanced battlefields with even numbers will help that. Same thing for "stopping the zerg."

Haemish, the grind is still there. The fact that I'm forced to move doesn't make the game more fun, it makes it more annoying because everyone knows how it's hard to find a good spot with good exp and without dying. Being forced to tweak this process continuously is simply annoying.

Instead, my old suggestion about the battlegrounds was in fact about instancing them completely and out of the server boundaries. something that I suggested also for WoW. In this way not only you have balanced PvP but you can gather players among all the servers and so always have lively battlegrounds for all the levels and also outside peak hours.

The other suggestion works both to stop the zergs and fix the population umbalances in the frontiers (not BGs). And it was about designing roles and purposes for smaller groups.

Haemish, those are design flaws that can be solved.

First off, camping can not be "solved." If it is ever more efficient to sit in one place killing the same mobs, it will be done. Hell, it's done even in games where it is totally against the norm (i.e. CoH). I move around in CoH PVE (non-mission based) more than I do in DAoC PVE simply because the spawn sites are so much more dynamic, not to mention CoH has faster movement and more interesting terrain to move through. I HATE camping, especially when I'm solo, but the diminishing camp bonuses have NEVER made me move when I don't want to. So in essence, without changing their entire spawn system, no amount of camp bonuses or penalties are ever going to fix that issue of the PVE grind in DAoC.

It does, however, make the gaining of experience faster, even if you don't move around, because the bonuses are higher. That's all it's about; it doesn't go any deeper than that. They may say it will help population imbalances, but nothing you do to the leveling curve will ever help that because the causes of population imbalance have nothing to do with the leveling process. What it will do is make the new players level faster without having to be powerleveled by their guild, which they probably won't have as new players anyway. The faster you get new blood out into RVR, the quicker they either realize they have to stay awhile to get competitive or the faster they leave.

I don't know about your experiences, but my experiences in the battleground have been fine without any sort of population balancing. Do I get absolutely owned some days by being outnumbered? Yep. But I still have fun with it, probably more fun than I'll have in the frontier RVR because the barrier to entry is low.

All the camp bonus and free level changes are doing is making the barrier to RVR entry lower for new or non-catass players.

During the brief period just after SI when I played DAoC, we always moved around while hunting, because it was faster than waiting for respawn...  Then again, I played a bard, with a warden and mana enchanter as partners.  Warden would pull and distract stuff, enchanter would kill it, move to next spot.  I mostly played endurance songs and healed the Warden so he could survive to taunt stuff off the enchanter.

We killed some really insane stuff in that game using that method, considering our level(mid 30's for the enc and warden, I was low 20's).  The damage output of a mana enchanter is just obscene, even against deep purple mobs.

--
Alkiera

I wouldn't agree that it's useless.  Not as useful as you and I would like, absolutely.  It's still a pretty big and positive change, especially if you consider the attitude that seems to have been held towards this in the past (something along the lines of the xp grind being sacred and untouchable).

Actually if anything, I think the biggest problem with this entire situation is that 1.71 was heralded (pun intended) by Mythic as "Ye Ultimate PvE Fix" or the like.  It does a lot to alleviate the grind, but it certainly doesn't change it into no longer being a grind.

Again relating some recent experiences, I did a little XP'ing last night in the Frontier (for an hour until I got ganked), and I found it was absolutely worth my while to move around.  15min at a camp, then find another camp, and at the new camp if I was lucky I would get close to double XP for a bit.  Of course I was also pretty much solo, so moving wasn't a big deal.  I still don't think I'd ever move around as a group.

That's what I say too. That's why the tweak makes the players just a bit more annoyed and doesn't help the grind. It's not the spawn system that has to change, but the "grind".

And the grind can only change if you attach a prurpose to it. This is why WoW doesn't have the grind. Because you don't kill the monster for their experience, you kill them to go on with the quests, in the same way you kill monsters in a single player game like Baldur's Gate.

I'm just saying "it's not impossibe" and "Mythic solutions are weak".


I really don't understand how Mythic is able to fool you like that. What Haemish said is the whole scope. The grind is allieviated only if you consider the camp bonus as "faster exp" and so faster levelling.

What Mythic did with this whole system is simply to cut the "time". If before you had to go through 50 boring levels, now you have to go through 25.

What I mean is that NOTHING has changed on the gameplay. They only affected the time.

And this is common since Mythic can only understand "time" and "timesink" in thier design concept. The quality of the game is exactly like before. The grind is there like before. They are simply removing, once again, the boring parts the best they can.

But the core of the question is that you don't make better games by removing their parts, but only by turning those parts into something fun and valuable. Mythic ISN'T able to give value to their potential.

If they are serious about getting people to hunt rarely killed mobs, I'd estimate they'd need bonuses that reach up between 700-1000%.

And to be honest - they might as well go with bonuses that high.

A 1000% camp bonus, only available to those who move around, and are therefore only 30% efficient at killing (a very high estimate) would mean maximum of only 3x faster xp for the last three levels.

Nobody is going to convince me the game would suffer in any way if the last levels were only a third of their current length.

No one except Mythic's bank account. Longer grind = longer subscriptions. If a player wants it shorter they can start a buffbot or two. It's all about the money and I can't really blame Mythic for wanting to make more money. As other people have said, the fun is in the battlegrounds so who really cares how long it takes to get to level 50?

Inevitable feedback and grab bag question reflecting why the bulk of the current approach to population balance can never work...



As various people posted above, pop balance actions can only realy work on the basis of 'once you get ahead it's harder and harder to stay ahead'.

Putting enemy relics in ordinary keeps is a good example.

What can't really work is individual level bonuses/penalties where your character gets less effective as your realm gets more successful (and therefore attracts population).

And nothing will. The gameplay is NOT GOING TO CHANGE IN ANY SIGNIFICANT WAY through this. I don't honestly see how or why you expect it to.

They have made, are making and will continue to make money off the current gameplay. They have over 200k subscribers who are happily (or grudgingly) paying for the current type of gameplay they have. They have no incentive to change the gameplay signficantly. What they have done is to quicken the run through the grind, which will help alleviate burnout on new players and on those who are doing it again. That's it, that's all it's going to be.

This patch is not going to suddenly change your mind about DAoC's gameplay. Either you like it, tolerate it to get to the PVP, or you don't, at which point, nothing is going get your interest but an entirely new game.

Please, do not fucking tell me about the "non-grind" of WoW. It's in fucking beta. We all said the same thing about CoH. Every beta I've ever been in has had "faster" leveling than shortly after release. Maybe there isn't a grind now in WoW. Think about going through newbie quests again, for the 4th or 5th time.

It will be there, it just may take longer than in other games to really fell grindy.

Or faster cancellations from people fed up with overly long timesinks.

All games can get grindy if the gameplay isn't more fun than the compulsion to be a higher level/have more gear/whatever compels killing mobs ad nauseum. Been that way for every game I've played that has advancement tied to killing mobs, IE: everything since UO.

So every game on the earth, aside twitch, is a grind. Single player games included.

Obviously it will be less interesting if you have to level various characters. What you want here? A miracle?

Actually WoW excels even here. There's a post at Grimwell where Geldon says how Blizzard has developed completely different *systems* around each class. This is similar to play a completely different game. Add this to the fact that you can choose a different faction for a different world and I think we have reached near the maximum in longevity.

You can choose a different faction for a different world in DAoC. Perhaps the systems between classes isn't terribly different, but I see nothing that WoW has done that automatically says it won't get grindy after awhile.

ANYTHING gets grindy after awhile. WoW will too.