f13.net

Mythic are announcing details of DAoC expansion number 4 at their fanmeet this weekend.

GOA (the comedy outfit that attempts to host DAoC in Europe) has released the following....


Reports from message boards purporting to be from people at the fan meet (mostly VN so discount as appropriate)...








(I love that last one.)

If this means MLs again, but this time balanced for 8 people, instanced to avoid spawn timer nonsense, and avoiding stupid steps like, well, all of ML3, then it's probably possible to avoid the horrors of ToA.

To forestall the question someone would inevitably ask within 5 posts...

No. They aren't going to fix buffbots.

Gotta be honest. After playing (and losing but not caring that much about the losses) the pvp in guild wars, I care not for any other MMORPG. At all.  :-D

Note to any Mythic people reading: This expansion looks interesting. Lots of your recent patches look good.

I will resub when buffbots are fixed, and not a minute sooner.

I'll resub when you make combat like Mount & Blade (http://www.taleworlds.com/).

Buffbots/Realm Imbalance/Insane Grind without Powerleveling/TOA catassing: Nothing could possibly bring me back until these are all fixed.

Not that I have anything worth coming back to, but yeah, what he said.

Eh, everything about DAoC is mostly bearable and at this point it's a pretty well flushed out game in both PvP and PvE aspects. I do admit that ToA was pretty game-breaking though. As far as I'm concerned, the games' biggest problem wasn't any of the stuff previously mentioned, it was the complete lack of cheesecake, especially pantyshots. And yes, I'm completely serious. Why do you think so many people are able to stand Lineage 2? The game is complete hell, but the copious ammounts of pseudo-porn make the game very entertaining. DAoC could stand to learn a lesson from that game, because frankly I don't like not being able to tell chicks from guys without seeing their face. I'm really looking forward to the Conan game and I'm crossing my fingers for the day when somebody makes some Gorean monstrosity coupled with some kind of VR helmet. That would be really great. Come on pandering game industry, get busy!

Am I the only one who keeps misreading the topic as "- with Hroses"?

I get visions of angry little italian mobs running around reshaping the landscape to some twisted view of reality.

I am currently active in DAOC because my wife wanted to try Catacombs, after WoW graphics made her physically ill.  She's pregnant, go figure. 

Anyway after playing GuildWars for a few days, I must say that this could be the real DAOC-killer for me.  My last couple of months in DAOC were nothing but a timesink.  I rolled a new Catacombs character, gave up when I got to 44 and realized how miserable the ToA grind would be.   Went back to my 50 hero and druid, couldn't find any groups for RvR.  I think I had one good group in 3 weeks of trying.

DAOC just feels like a job, and with a baby on the way, I'm better off focusing on my real job.

As for the expansion, yeah all that sounds nice, I'm just betting that around November I will not feel any real compulsion to pick up that grind again.  Better to move on to newer shinier things with less baggage.

I'm too much a WoW-addict to go back to DAOC's issues. It was a fun ride while it lasted, and it was the first MMOG I cut my teeth on. It'll have a special place in my heart. But, I played one hour in ToA, and I quit the game forever. I'll never resub again.

Attention any Mythic employees reading this thread, I think the message is clear: Get rid of ToA and throw money at me to consult on panty art for your character models. And maybe some of the hotter NPC's and monsters. It's a win-win-win situation for everyone. You get more subscribers, I get more money, and players get less ToA and more panties.

Frost Elves totally should have been in t-backs and spike-heeled leather thigh highs.

/agree +1 psudo porn

The big rumor now (after the last login poll) is that the "no ToA" server is going to go in.  Which makes sense,  since most folks who've played have finished ToA/artifacts now, and have too much time/effort involved in realm ranks.

Honestly,  the xp grind is fairly easy now.  Between reductions in xp needed, changes to the camp bonus xp,  the "free level" system,  and many more xp quests.  A quick example, I have a lvl 40 animist with about 1.5 days played on him,  counting quite a bit of time in bgs.  (And no, I don't bot). The artifacts/farming scrolls/items are much more the pain in the ass.

Even Master Levels are fairly easy now,  since numerous fixes (Example for those who know,  my server ran a ML 3 a few weeks ago that did everything in about 1.5 hours.  ML 3 is one of the ones that have been fixed the most, lately.)  MLxp is more of a problem.

If the item/artict acquisition wasn't a complete pain.....

Oh,  and one each of the Catacombs expansion classes was explicitly designed to operate free of buffs.

Vampiir's can't be buffed.  (and are damn fun to play in pve or battlegrounds)
Heretics have self buffs.
Warlocks abilities aren't really effected by buffs.

You left out the other Cats classes:  Bainshees and Valkyries.  Both are highly buffable, and they are throw-backs to the old school classes.  Except that Bainshees are seen as ridiculously overpowered.  Nobody even bothers to play Valkyries, who seem to be a misguided experiment.

As for a no-ToA server, I think they are missing the point.  Yes, it is easy to get xp now.  But I simply would like to have fun in RvR with my Realm Rank 7 hero, who I stopped playing about 18 months ago, after ToA arrived.  Well, I gave it another go when New Frontiers was released, but I realized very quickly that tanks had no role in the new keep-centric warfare.

So great, they finally admit that ToA stinks and they remove it from a new server or two.  Tons of players flock to the new no-ToA server(s), the population on the existing servers plummets, and nobody is happy yet again.

This is me exactly, except I suffered through more than a hour of ToA. I think it was ML3 that was the finals straw for me.

Though the battlegrounds kept me subbed for awhile. I had a blast in the 20-25 and 35-39 BG's

I yearn for a classic server: no RA's, no spellcrafting, and no ToA.  There's something pure about having to make hard choices on itemization  and having limited character abilities on which to base your combat decision tree from, and not being able to cap out every stat, resist, and +skill, and whip out the I-PWN from your pants every half-hour.

DAOC is still a great concept that got fucked by its own designers.

Hands down, Mythic is the best game company I ever subscribed with.  I think really highly of that company, their management, and some of the technical architecture they have (they have real "real-time" combat)

Unfortunately, I had to stop playing DAoC 3 years ago.  It's the most conservative, strict, puratanical... whatever description you want, it ain't flexible.  PvP is the end game, and if you ain't lvl50 yer fucked.  Their grind is appallingly hard and boring, and few people play that game enough anymore to make it interesting.  It just wasn't worth their extra effort.  Content is pretty thin now unfortunately.  They honestly need to loosen things up a bit.

Wonderful company, but the game is bit dated now

If the game is to be considered outdated, it's due to the cruft of feature, spell, and ability bloat that's tipped the see-saw of balance drastically towards one way or the other(i.e. all the little sorceror buffs over time and several patches that turned the class from uber gimp to uber).  Do they really need players to wrack their minds over spellcrafting formulas?  Was giving assassin classes 2.2 or 2.5X spec points/level really necessary?  Were all those NF towers really needed?  New and returning players will probably have no clue what 3/4 of the new slash commands do.

The game and combat mechanics are completely shot, but Mythic has done a good job over the years updating the graphics, and DAOC still has kept its dark medieval feel that I loved alot.

Tear the whole thing down and rebuild each class from scratch.  DAOC became less fun for me as each year added a whole new hotbar of abilities I had to scroll to in the heat of battle.

I honestly believe Shadowbane is less of a clusterfuck than DAOC.

edit: But perhaps DAOC has the bigger carrot.

DAOC was the first mmog that broke my heart.  I loved that game the first year or so.  Spellcrafting and RAs were ok, considering how terrific the Shrouded Isles expansion was.  Trials of Atlantis came out, and I tried it, hated it, tried it again, hated it more, and spent the remainder of my time there in the battlegrounds.

Finally I just quit after months of moaning/wishing/hoping they'd remove ToA. 

DAOC had so much promise, and then the designers went the complete wrong direction for me.  I guess there are people who still enjoy playing it, though.  Or not.  Population seems to be in decline since ToA.

I definitely agree. But pushing back the clock in order to hope for some nostalgia to kick in is even more stupid.

You can bet that it's exactly what they'll do.

You nailed it down. They kept (and are keeping) ignoring all the real flaws in order to desperately chase "teh pretty".

The new Catacombs zones (http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/storeroom/daoc-repository/daocstory.html) are breathtaking but there are holes in the design that completely ruin the gameplay.

A game with an unexpressed potential and without anymore a direction.

Nice, thanks for the link.  I'll give this a try soon.

I was in the middle of master level 5 and I logged out mid raid. I realized 6 hours had passed and I only had 20% of it done and it would be like 5 more hours of pain. It just wasn't worth it.

GW 4 teh win!!11!

Yeah at some point with these farming-oriented games, you must ask yourself what the hell you are doing.  Unless you plan on selling all your stuff on e-bay, it becomes obscene to spend 50+ hours on a series of raids just to improve your farming ability with a "mega uber pet" ability.  And even if you do plan to sell the stuff for real-life cash, your effective hourly wage would be eclipsed by simply serving burgers at McDonald's.  DAOC fell into the trap of catering to the obsessive-compulsive crowd and the e-bayers, and they have paid dearly for it.

Prediction:  DAOC's next expansion will be its last, and Imperator (a.k.a. togas in space) will flop like Vin Diesel in a French romantic comedy.

I'd like to take this opportunity to pimp my idea for a game that unapologetically tells the catasses to step off, and has extremely easy (for a catass, but balanced for a casual) content.

WoW is probably almost there, but it looks like they are taking their first steps down the mudflation/catasseriffic trail.

I say let 'em quit!  They are a minority anyway, if a vocal one.

I suppose it's too late for DAOC.

I like instancing so far in WoW to a point. The 40 man raids are just dumb. I went to MC last night and it was awful. I don't think I could fathom trying to grind my way down in that place.

I am completely behind this.  I was hoping Blizz would not cave in, but this player-farming patch has greatly dismayed me.  Someone with some balls will eventually come along, ignoring the catass/troll whiners, letting their first-to-max-level asses fall off the end of the game... leaving it to people who actually want to have fun in the game.  It would also help if developers would stop trying to create their own EQ2.

I'm hoping GuildWars is the beginning of a trend, or the bucking of the EQ trend, whichever you prefer.  Its purported resemblance to EQ/WoW/any MOG is largely fictional.  It is also incredibly fun.

Yeah, Blizz /seems/ on board, but it feels like that is changing. Certainly the "Honor Rewards" were implemented with only the hardcore in mind, Not just the amount of killing to get a ranking, but the relative nature and weekly maintenance of your stature or losing gear? Then layer on the fact that it also caters to organized guilds at the expense of soloers and casual groupers (especially and egregiously on pvp servers), and it's a troubling sign.

Certainly lit the fire under my butt to go play Planetside and not WoW, fwiw.

Agreed.  Females models in DAOC - and costumes - could have been designed far better.

Feh.  I can see my ex-DAoC catass addict friends resubbing for something like this.  I can't wait to hear for hours at a time on the phone about how fucked up Mythics attempts to balance the game is and how pathetic Mythic as a company is...  all while they run around Emain looking for fights.  :roll:

I have nothing against the cheesecakes itself. Its all the immature behavior that tends accompany the cheesecake.  I think GW so far has done a good job of making females attractive without looking stripers and S&M fetishists.  Fan Service seems out of place in the social MMOG environment.

I guess you haven't seen the female Elementalist outfit, or the dances of female Rangers or Elementalists.

I think they're the worst female dances.

I have much luv for the Monk, Warrior, and Necro dances. My Mesmer dance is amusing too.

HORSES! And only after 3 years of promising them. I remember Jacobs first big address at the end of 2001, saying that horses and houses would be in soon-ish. It's about time.

Frankly, there is so much good about DAoC, but it's just all overwhelming crushed by the need to level, then the need to level artifacts, then the need to level master levels and blah de blah blah. It's the only MMOG I've ever resubbed to. Level 20-24 battlegrounds were pure butter. Everything after that was a boring ordeal of looking at my Exp. bar and thinking of how much fun the RVR would be. And that was after the free xp. and xp. for PVP was added.

It takes too long to level, and MMOG's with any sort of competition has shown that if it goes to 11, 10 will not do. Thus, everyone in RVR is at 11, while I'm stuck grinding through 5.

I share the same fear for WoW.

And your perception of DAoC may be wrong. I'm not sure the catasses are a minority right now.

What I believe is that this isn't fun for anyone. Catasses included. But that's an heresy.

spot on.  It's the worst grind I've ever known (other than Jedi, and earning that now feels like Herpes, or whatever is the STD that makes your dick fall off).  I always liked how well Mythic communicated and ran its hosts, but ultimately someone in Design there is way too conservative and always falls on the side of making everything they offer longer by the yard.  Mythic is in some serious denial if they believe they are going to get "new" players because the whole end-game for DAoC is PvP, and there ain't no one in the low-levels BG's and you can't enjoy any raids unless >45 level.  No will survive a full and honest grind to lvl50 in DAoC -- been there, tried it, impossible.

Pshah, it's still just "pants-asy".

*Goes back to killing Merovignian and Zion operatives for the Machines*

I did notice the $29.99 sticker on the thousands of matrix boxes at my local software store - another $20 off and I might pick one up.

I can assure you that the problems you are seeing from the outside aren't the problems you'll notice if actually playing the game.

The slow levelling pace is definitely not the problem right now. It's the radical problems in the gameplay to make the experience dull and boring. Even the PvP endgame is nowhere fun right now due to the dynamics of the combat.

If you have the interest to start again I suggest to pick up the Catacombs expansion and download the two optional patches. You'll notice that the problem is what you DO to level. The gameplay itself. Not that the treadmill is slow.

They sent me a long email about a huge weekend long event involving Vampire and Warewolf exiles and all kinds of craziness.  So far they've followed through with their "we're going to have an actual storyline" promise.  It sounded fairly cool but I'm not going to go to the game boards and try to verify if it was fun.

I dont understand -- is it still a micro-grind or not?  Or is it fairly constant to 50 over a few weeks, it just takes a PhD to get there?

Honestly from 1 to 50 goes very fast with Catacombs.  Take the Vampiir for example, lots of people report getting to 50 in about 3 days /played, without any twinking.  But there are two problems despite the new accelerated leveling speed. 

Number one, as Hrose says, it is deadly boring soloing your way from 1-50.  You will simply be clicking the same buttons in the same order, as you repetitively pull one thing after another.  Not much variety, not much plot. 

And number two, once you hit 50, you will realize that the real grind has not even begun.  Everybody knows that the Trials of Atlantis expansion added 10 hellish "master levels" after 50, each of which takes a large raid to accomplish.  And all of the hardcore RvR players swear by "artifacts," which are items that must themselves be levelled.

The real "micro-grind" happens *after* you hit 50, and that is what really kills any pretense of casual friendliness.

And what if I don't want to play a "Vampir"? Am I just heaping grind upon grind on to myself then?

Seriously though, it's not necessarily the grind I have the biggest problem with in that game. It's the majority of classes, and the worthlessness thereof.

The problem is rather complex and it's not easy to explain in a few lines. I wrote something like a review of Catacombs here (http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/node/657) but it's a bit too long and dispersive even if I discuss some general problem of the game.

The levelling isn't the problem because it's the part that was tweaked the most. This is nowhere the game of three years ago and it's actually faster than WoW.

There's also to say that now you have CHOICES. You can level in private corridors where you have to slay a row of 30 mobs waiting in a line (i'm not joking), you can level completely in PvP along the various battlegrounds. You can level doing the quests in Catacombs.

DAoC is still badly planned on many aspects. One is the class system. So you can expect to solo efficiently in a few cases and not at all in other cases. The very FIRST thing you'll notice isn't that the experience is slow. But that the downtimes and the actual combat is painful. You'll have to sit for long periods after each kill so you'll be bored as hell after a few minutes but not because of the actual treadmill but because of the gameplay itself.

The other problem is about the community. Now that the world is large, with the various possibilities and instances, it is very hard to log in and find easily mates to do something. So yes, you can level through PvP. IN THEORY. You have to make sure that you can actually find opponents and that you are able to win. Haemish, the last time, didn't leave the game because it was SLOW. He left because he couldn't find peoples in the battlegrounds, so he was basically stuck at grinding the PvE (which noone tolerates anymore).

The excessive downtimes make the game like a chore after the first five mobs you kill. The more you level the more the downtimes will increase. So it's not like if killing five mobs to kill is "too much" but it's HOW you kill them. The novelty of the gameplay fades rather quickly.

Along the way there are many, many problems that will become obvious. The early BGs are ridiculous. You can find only stealthed players behind siege weapons that one-shot kill you as you run by. So, again, there are (fun) possibilities in theory, but the reality is different.

The same for the endgame. In theory is great. In the practice you'll notice all the glaring problems: damage scale gone out of the roof, extremely annoying interrupts, buffbots, organized ganking /assist groups, difficulty in finding casual parties to join and so on... At the end it's not playable as you'd expect.

I gathered a list of changes (http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/node/678) that the game strongly needs but Mythic has always kept a conservative approach. They keep tweaking the details but they do not address the more serious gameplay issues. They can shorten the experience between the levels even more, give out free levels as they are doing but that will do *nothing* against the problems of the actual gameplay.

So that's where the problems are. The game has still potential but it's ruined if those problem at the base aren't addressed.

The list of changes I'd like is shorter...

Just halve the amount of xp required in 1-50.

Double the group bonus xp, because the overhead of group management outweighs the current advantages of a group by a massive amount.

Make alternative instanced sources of artifacts available. Or just put in new, 1fg instanced encounters that reward players with new artifacts. Note when deisgning such encounters that hanging about waiting for a spawn timer is not an enjoyable mechanic.

Halve the amount of xp required to level an artifact.

Reduce the spawn timers on every ML or artifact mob in ToA by *at least* 75%. For ML mobs other than end-of-dungeon bosses where loot distribution might be an issue, the absolute maximum on a timer should be 5 minutes. For dungeon bosses we could stretch to half an hour. If this encourages loot farming, move the loot onto a non-ML mob for christssake.

Remove the pointless and annoying requirement to do the x.10 ML steps last.

Range on buff effectiveness please.

Didn't they change that already ?

Anyhow, lvls 1-49 are so pointless now.  They could as well scrap it entirely and let everyone create lvl 50s instantly and change the PvE game into just a "get the shiny". That would enable them also to scrap all those useless empty Classic and SI zones.

CoH and WoW remove any doubt from my mind I'd ever go back to the EQx, DAOC, etc of the world.  Though I'd love player-run server versions of the latter products - RunUO (http://www.runuo.com/) and DOL (http://dolserver.sourceforge.net/) are the cat's pajamas.

Not as far as I know. They did make it so that you can do x.10 of a ML you aren't at yet, so long as you have completed x.1-9. For instance an ML4 person can do ML 6.1-9 and then complete ML6.10, then as soon as you complete ML5, you would get ML6 (assuming you have enough MLxp).

Oh, one more thing to add.

Minimum ML limits on entering dungeons (effectively preventing low ML chars completing high ML steps when an opportunity arises) are a stupid idea. I can see why you might put these limits on for a short time after launch, just to force a slow reveal of content. But they should automatically open to everyone once a certain number of characters in a realm reach a specific ML.

The scary part is, with the reminders of the ML talk, I have a bad feeling that WoW is going to attempt a similar type of thing with Hero Classes.

Ah yes, think you're right.

I'm not playing anymore either but from following the forums the ToA threadmill has been seriously reduced though. Most MLs have been tweaked to the point you can rush through them pretty fast, ml and artifact xp are pretty easy to get. The threadmill is far less frustrating then it used to be.

Apparently the major problem nowadays is getting your hands on the the good artifacts and unlocking them. Rather unsurprisingly farmers are camping the good ones 24/7 and then sell them for big money. I've read about prices of up to 80p (!) for an artifact which is frankly insane.Then on top of that you need the notes to unlock them which sometimes can get really expensive too ...

ToA has actually some great design and, very oddly, some insanely crappy design at the same time (hello ml 2.10 and entire ml 3).

They're there, and the "wooden stakes" (for vampires), "silver bullets" (for werewolves) and "holy water" (succubi) drop from low-level mobs and can be sold on the player market for a lot of $Information (which, along with using ! as a thousands separator) is MxO's irritating name for money. And you need a lot of money, since leveling your character is insufficient, you also need to level around half your skills for money.

The problem is that all the gangs - from the lowly level 1 street trash to the ass-kicking demon-like ass-kickers of Kickass - are supposed to be exiles, like the Merovignian (who is one of the three factions with Zion and the Machines). But I got the impression from the movies that the exiles were relatively few in number? In the game they are like everywhere.

But how can you not love a game that calls a flashlight "Concealment Countermeasure Device"? It does steal a whole lot from City of Heroes though.

Actually, I like the gameplay. As a scout the last time through, I enjoyed it. But I don't enjoy it for long periods. The PVE is not boring because of what you do, but what the mobs do and how long it takes to get any new abilities. 1-20 was fine. Once I hit battlegrounds that were populated (20-24 were populated thanks to the number of /level 20 characters available), I had a blast and the gameplay was solid. But there was way too much of the other needed, the boring PVE, that took way to long to make it worthwhile. The gameplay in PVE would have been fine if I only had to endure about 1/4 of it to make a viable PVP character. Speeding up the treadmill helped, but I don't really enjoy much PVE for long, no matter how good it is. Even CoH begins to wear on me at times.

I left because in order to find populated battlegrounds, I had to endure a LOT more levelling, a process that was already taking too long as it was.

Actually, I can confirm that they DID change that, probably a month ago.  You can do any step 10 of any ML, in any order.  However, some ML dungeons do still have prerequisites to enter. They also added a cool feature where the battlegroup leader on a ML raid can grant credit to anybody in the BG for any step the BG has completed.  This helps tremendously when people go linkdead or whatever.  If these changes had been made in December 2003, a lot of people might have not quit over ToA. Now it's great, but it feels like too little too late.

It is undeniable that ML raids have become more tolerable, but it is correct that artifact camping is insane.  Certain players just farm these things 24/7 and sell them.  It's especially stupid, because the game already tracks if a person has already completed each artifact encounter.  It would be relatively trivial to add code saying "If player has credit for encounter X already, do not allow them to receive another copy of artifact X."  But instead, you have some players who run 4 accounts, and systematically pharm the encounters every time the spawn on their 12-hour cycle or whatever.   It's insane and prevents legitimate players from having any shot at getting these items, unless they are willing to pay the monopoly prices charged by the uber leet pharmers.

Dammit, now I can't stop seeing the topic like that.

Are people still playing this game?

Good Gates, the bar is set pretty low…

What?  Mmmm... pass.

This is MMOG's, the business equivalent of the fucking Limbo. Try to keep up.

Excuse my ignorance but why are these artifact thingies tradeable?

To use an artifact you have:

1- Get credit for the encounter (one time thing) and get the artifact itself (you have to win loot)
2- Farm/buy the three scrolls (more or less rare drops from specific types of mobs) to activate it
3- Level it by farming some more

Only when the artifact is active it becomes non-tredeable (also, due to the "smart" decay system in DAoC once the artifact cannot be repaired anymore it's destroyed and you cannot get a new one).

Those scrolls are now the center of the whole economy of the game. I think I can pull a rule from this:
"If something becomes important for the economy in a game, it means it sucks"

Should point out that you have to be an extreme rvr catass to completely wear an artifact out assuming you have done a modicum of research into decay rates and ideal repair points.

Or just asked someone in your guild 'at what condition % should I repair x?'.

Thanks, I understand the problem now and why so many people dislike ToA.

 :-o Wtf?

Yes, about a month ago, I got my first couple of artifacts, just to see what it was like.  I spent about 2 evenings with a guild group in a dungeon where these things get xp (they only gain xp in certain places).  After probably 6 hours, my artifacts were about level 2.5 out of 10.

I swear, I only reactivated because my wife wanted to try Catacombs!  :-P

The fun thing is how easy these problems are to solve and, still, they do nothing if not after months and years of rants and complaints.

I guess it makes too much sense to allow the artifacts to be levelled in PvP and I'm also sure that they'll patch this ...someday.

The artifacts ARE leveled in pvp.

Are you sure? If it's true it happened recently.

Positive.  One of the first arty xp changes Mythic made was making all artifacts gain xp from rvr, about the same time xp from killing an enemy player was massively bumped.  I remember on Test this caused some glitches, as people leveled artifacts all the way on relatively few kills.

The problem with ToA bonuses and artifacts is that you really need to be geared out before rvr.  Otherwise, artifacts are just items with shitty bonuses.

As for getting the artifacts....  Artifact campers aren't a problem.  Basically, the routine is to get credit with an artifact raid that hits up to a couple dozen artifacts,  and then buy the artifact from a farmer or keep going and try to get lucky with the lotto.

The real breakdown with artifacts:

1. Certain artifacts are in high demand,  because they are pretty much useful for all classes.  Guard of Valor, Maddening Scalars,  Malice Axe (for melees), Tartaros Gift (for casters), Shades of Mist are pretty much mandatory.  This spikes the demand for certain artifacts and scrolls,  while alot of others are just ignored.

I'd recommend that other artifacts be bumped to spread out the demand in scrolls.

2. Certain scrolls are fucking pains to get.  Guard of Valor, Regarding Shades, Tart Gift, Scalars......  low drop rates from red con mobs.

Scroll drop rates for some of the rare scrolls needs to be further bumped.

3. Items.  Everyone is chasing a few certain low drop items,  since those are the only things that work in temps to come close to maxing your stats and bonuses.  There's a great deal of pent up demand on items that can't even be reliably farmed.

Items, especially old world and SI, need to be bumped.

And Haemish:  I think I remember you were on Alb/Pel.  Pel has since been clustered,  and most of the bgs have a fair amount of activity.  Cept for Wilton (30-34).  That's still a deadzone.

The 20-24 bg has big numbers (20-40 on the hib side, equal or greater numbers of albs)
The 25-29 is much lighter, but has around 6-10 hibs at any time.
We won't talk about the 30-34 sargasso.....
35-39 has good numbers and fights.  Probably 15-30 hibs, same on alb side.
40-44 as well.

Before clustering,  only Thidranki (20-24) and Molvik (35-39) had any people.

My mind just crapped out halfway through your post, Johnny. If it's that much trouble for me to even read about it, then it most definitely, sure as hell doesn't belong in a video game.

Always been the case - but in pvp the process is so incredibly slow you'll never notice it happening.

And you don't get the pvp xp multiplier for artifact xp.

Correct, it's simply ungodly slow to gain xp for an artifact in RvR.  I would estimate that 100 kills might give you 1% of one artifact level.  Probably 100,000 RvR kills would fully level an artifact!  I'm not sure if even the uberest of the RvR uber has passed the 100k kill mark yet.

As for Johnny's comments, I think it they are illustrative of the degree to which really horrible world designs can eventually appear normal and acceptable to those who stay in the "game."  I've seen myself doing it, getting sucked into the "this is simply the way it works and I guess it's not so bad" mentality, then snapping back when reality somehow intrudes.  Namely, the reality that my so-called "game" is a nothing more than an all-consuming chore, and I would be better off doing yard work.  Fortunately I actually have a yard now!  It was easier to justify catassing, when I lived in a townhouse with a homeowner's association doing all the outside work for a ridiculous fee.

It was not "always the case" that artifacts leveled in PvP.  That was one of the things they changed to make ToA more player-friendly.  But they botched it by making the amount of xp one would gain on an artifact from PvP be completely negligible.  Kinda like when they initially added experience to RvR, but left it at the default amounts so that killing another player of equal level was like killing any yellow mob.  So that killing another group in a full group is worth about 2 yellow mobs.

Then, a year or two later, they finally got the hint and boosted the experience reward to what it had been on Mordred since its release.  By then, however, I had already quit.

DAoC was my first MMOG and, partially because of that and partially due to justified reasons, I've had no greater love/hate relationship with a developer than with Mythic.  Though a friend of mine got a job working on Imperator there, so good for him.

The clustering was a temporary bandaid to a deeper problem. They chose once again to adress it superficially.

What they should have tried is to instance the BGs dynamically and drawing the players from ALL the servers. This is the only way to grant always a balanced number of players along all the battlegrounds active throughout all the day.

Again, it was a missed occasion.

In no particular order, I think Mythic needs to:

1) Shrink the land mass down.  Right now, there's no 'central' area for banking, selling items, or meeting up to form groups.  Everyone, or whoever is left, is spread out and there's no sense of community.  There's no reason to have a new capital city with every expansion.  The frontiers could stand to lose several zones and keeps, to the point where each realm has only 1-2 zones and 2-4 keeps.

2) Reduce the effects of buffs and work on making support classes 'more fun to play' and having more active abilities.  WoW, for example, got healing classes done right.  They're powerful on their own and capable of dishing out DPS.  But in groups, they have the comparative advantage of healing while other classes do the damage.

3) Address radar for once and for all by building it into the game and leveling the playing field.

4) Curb back RA's and introduce other, non-balance-affecting rewards for RR's.  RvR's focus should be fun, not another level grind that favors elitist clustering.




Toss those ideas on the heap of Mythic's suggestion box.

And fix buffbots.

And reduce the importance of ToAed items.

And make those same ToAed items not a ridiculous pain to get.  Having to gather a few groups together to GET an item, then having to spend weeks levelling that item so that it's actually useful is just plain stupid.

And fix master levels.  Get rid of "Master Level Experience" altogether.  That's just another grind, there's no point to it.  Rebalance the encounters to be doable with a single group.  That is- a single realistic group, not a hypothetical group with 4 Animists, a Warden, Bard, Druid and Hero plus another Druid buffbot sitting outside the group.  Balance the encounters realizing that people doing them are probably not entirely equipped with ToA stuff, and they shouldn't be expected to have particular master level abilities at their disposal.

And you ought to take a look at the movement system and see if you can make it any smoother.  Games like World of Warcraft and City of Heroes make running around DAoC feel really awkward.  If it can't be changed, oh well, but it'd be worth looking into.