f13.net

Looks like the single raid mob has been downed (http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=275570). Locking out the other faction in a PvP game is novel and in terms of a raid encounter I don't think Blizzard is quivering in their boots just yet. The thread I linked is pretty painful but the tank (Odz) for it gives a concise summary of the encounter;


Apparently the reaction on the opposing side is mass whining and people announcing they are re-rolling or quitting. Sounds like a great PvP endgame in action. I'm also interested in where they go from here (other than the obvious of him respawning and being farmed) considering Karl Franz is one of the biggest bosses the lore has to offer.

I'll be disappointed if the dropped loot isn't bugged in some way.

King Encounter Video - Magus POV (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i-GtdkLMCU)

Click here for LootZ! (http://s54.radikal.ru/i143/0904/f0/67d6f644d6d0.jpg)


Basically it was a bunch of work to get to a PVE encounter to down a raid level mob, and people had to acquire 4 sets of different ward gear to make the journey to survive it.

Yeah, Mythic has a problem with their entire end game.

We tried to tell them this in beta, but got threatened with the ban stick if we tried to have an intelligent counter discussion with Mythic Devs.

from that thread...
:uhrr:

Guess this means he doesn't want me to rejoin WAR anymore.

I'm going to bet that 13 of those 14h were spent doing PvE. 

Well, that killed WAR for me.  I did ToA once already and that was more than enough. 

Yeah, this sounds just like a WOW raid.  Color me confused as to how this is supposed to be great PvP action.

That doesn't sound like a WoW raid at all. That makes it even worse than if it was a WoW raid in a PvP game.

WHAT THE FUCK WHY DID YOU FUCKING DO THIS T1 AND T2 ARE PERFECT YOU FUCKING IDIOTS

To be fair, they always said the pve king raid was the goal of attacking a city.  There is no bait and switch to angry about.

Not one comment about willpower on the choppa set, or weapon skill on the zealot set? Oh lawldy, there's ARMOR PENETRATION on the zealot set, and weapon skill on the Squig Herder set.  :awesome_for_real:

The pve aprt of the city raids was bitched about but accepted in beta.

The ward shit? Yeah, that was pulled out of their asses without so much as a peep in the beta about it coming down the line, and it may as well be named after degrees of cockblocking.

This dude needs to rewrite something like the Song of Fire and Ice like that.

Worse than a wow pve raid since it's just the one boss and yes, lawlz at the loot.

13-14 hours? That's no WoW raid, certainly not in the modern game.

That's worse than a 1.0 WoW raid. But he was counting wipes, so whatever. Mythic: if you're trying to copy someone, copy the shit they learned from said mistakes, and don't copy the 1.0. You're trying to be 5 years behind the damned curve on purpose or something.

They've actually stated numerous times that they compare their game mechanics to wow at release.

Well theres supposed to be three capitals per side.

This just reminded me of the random stats/skills item/loot generator from DAoC, I wonder if they are reusing that to assign loot in WAR now. Although, it would probably get more stat distributions for each class more correct then Mythic has done with their item corrections back in beta and at release (although, my marauder's belt of blocking was pretty bad ass) :oh_i_see:

That's amazingly stupid. Why would you actively throw out all the functional lessons learned from people who came before you.

That'd be, as Barnett said, because they'd didn't wanna be influenced by other games, and wanted to create their own distinct product, or some similar hogwash.

Ha, I doubt they even learned anything from WoW at release or WoW at any time.  We still have the pointless grind and there is no way anyone studing WoW as role model would have that.   These fuckers didn't learn anything from DAoC and that's their own game.  No way they can bothered to grok what other development teams are doing.  

I'm more inclined to blame the entire product on him than anything else, including Mark Jacobs. He's that much of an infectious disease.

Sigmar. :why_so_serious:

I had this same problem with WoW's racial leaders and DAoC's "keep lords":

Leaders are not leaders because they are demigods who can slaughter enitre groups of people. There's nothing epic about taking 40 people in to kill the king and having to fight him for ten minutes. Epic should be fighting the ENTIRE ARMY of said king, and then you arrive in the throne room and, like a chess checkmate, he lays down his arms because you've WON. A dragon as a raid boss I can accept, but a king? Bleah.

Plus if any king were that powerful while he's realm was at war it would be CRIMINAL for him not to be out destroying batallions single-handedly rather than sitting around in his throne room handing out quests all day.

...

Sorry, pointless unrelated nerd rage.

(http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/heavybarrel.JPG)

To be fair, in the tabletop game, Karl Franz is a bad ass too so you can argue that it's in keeping with the lore rather than being ultra-realistic (whatever that might mean in a fantasy game with wizards and chaos monsters).

That's just it. I'm not asking for ultra-realism, I'm asking for an epic moment. Everybody crowding into the throne room so they can get one-shotted by Deathclaw's AOE? How is that awesome? "Then we kited Karl Franz around the room, throwing everything we had at him until he yielded," is a lousy story. It doesn't even have potential. "We were playing for 14 hours," is considerably more epic, but not in a way anybody should be proud of.

Eh.

Maybe I should be glad they didn't have some tank park him facing the corner so everybody else could shoot him in the back for ten minutes.

They will increase his hit points now, it's obviously too easy to defeat him.

I play Destruction on that server (Karak Eight Peaks) and what most of the commentary seems to ignore is that, in order for Destruction to even get that far in the first place they have to have dominated the game for a good period beforehand, repeatedly taken fortresses and seiged Altdorf multiple times - which is exactly what has happened on K8P in the couple of weeks leading up to this. Now what do you think is going to happen now? Will Order magically rebound from this catastrophic defeat (which has reduced Altdorf to level one) and end the endless dominance of Destruction? Or will they just think "fuck this, what's the point?" and re-roll on a server where they might actually have a chance of winning once in a while or (more likely) quit and go and do something more fun?

So in addition to the huge long list of things that are wrong, broken or just outright bad about the endgame you can add the fact that Mythic, uncharacteristically, has not thought through the consequences of a realm being defeated? What's the reason to continue playing if you're on the losing side if the very fact that you're defeated means that the other side must be so dominant that you have no realistic hope of a comeback and, to top it off, the game decides to make defeat even worse than it already is by kicking you repeatedly in the balls?

A small change there, but you are right on the money. It appears that very little time was spent on working out what happens if one side reaches a particular point of domination, perhaps on the assumption that players would never get there.

Or maybe they have and right now a plan of clockwork precision is working to fix up everything on your server.  :awesome_for_real:

What are the gameplay implications of the city level being reset?

I can see I should have made my sarcasm slightly more obvious....



Oh yes I'm sure that's exactly it  :awesome_for_real:

I think the original intention of having three capital cities each realm would have helped this no end. For a start it would mean that a capital city siege doesn't matter quite so much. You guys are sieging Altdorf? Ok we're going to sneak off and siege the greenskin capital. And yes that opens up the possibility of "capital swapping", but that's got to be better than one side seeing none of the endgame content at all.

No pve dungeons.  Basically the losing side has absolutely no reason whatsoever to keep playing now, they don't have pve and are vastly outnumbered/geared/rred in pvp.

From the sounds of it that could be considered a bonus for that side  :why_so_serious:

How long is the losing side shut out of their capital? And holy fuck, they can't do things like access their banks, etc?

Between 12 and 24 hours I believe.  I think you get stuck at some refugee camp where you can think about what game you are going to play after you cancel your account

One of the biggest complaints about RvR has been that there are no consequences for letting the other side win, so there's no real reason to fight back.  Well, now we see the consequence, and it's pretty harsh, to the point where is demoralizes your playerbase and causes them to quit.  For me, personally, this looks like Mythic did make an attempt to fix an issue that existed in DAoC's RvR, but they really misread what people really wanted.

If what they said is true, the losing side will start getting npc's and buffs until it can push the enemies out.

I'm certain that they've got everything working flawlessly in that area.

The problem isn't that there are consequences for letting the other side win, the problem is that if one side wins its because the other side has been extremely disadvantaged for a VERY LONG TIME.  You are punishing them for being badly outnumbered, my server is the same way atm with order dominating tier 4 and having the run of our city virtually every day.  All it does is make the problem worse, who the fuck would roll order on that server now? why would the current order players stick around? 

People need to realize that open world faction pvp is NEVER fun. Oh it's tons of fun on paper and in some instances you can have a blast but it always ends up with one side having a huge advantage due to numbers and hurts the overall game.  For every person that likes world pvp there are a dozen who don't want to be arsed with it.

Imagine playing any multiplayer fps where it was always 10v5 and you get the idea. Adding buffs to one side doesn't work either because no matter how much damage or hp you can do, if you get swamped by opposing players you will lose.

There's a point where games ca't be realistic because quite frankly, real life isn't fair and if you are the wrong end it's not fun either. People pay for these games to have fun, no one on order was having fun that night.

Bullshit.  I had a ton of fun in DAoC world pvp despite its warts and problems.  For every dozen people who didn't want to be arsed with it, the majority just plain didn't like pvp regardless of how it was presented.  That's fine, but that's also not an indictment of world pvp specifically.

One of the biggest problems with world pvp in DAoC was certainly the realm imbalances, but Mythic made the problem that much worse when they cut down from three realms to two.  With three realms there's always the possibility of the two underdog realms ganging up on the strongest realm.  That happened a lot on my Hib server.  Of course, there's always the possibility that the two stronger realms beat up on the littlest realm.  That unfortunately happened a lot on my Alb server (Hi Ingmar & Sjofn!).  I always thought an interesting mechanic would be to force the two smaller realms to gang up on the bigger realm if the bigger realm past a certain threshold, simply by making the smaller realms neutral to each other if/when that threshold is past.  A dynamic like that at least has a chance at keeping one side from dominating too much, compared to the almost guaranteed fail of a two realm system.

Shit man, can't you see? That defeat will make Order group up and fight harder than ever due to realm pride!

And Daoc was such a smashing success wasn't it? Yes, like I just said some people will have fun but it pisses more people off than it entices. Sure if you want a niche game with world pvp there's a market but you won't be breaking 500k subs with it.  I think a lot of people like the idea of pvp, of player versus player combat but only when it's fair and balanced

As soon as you introduce things like gear cockblocks you lose some people, then introduce world pvp where one side nearly always has a numbers advantage and you lose more people. What companies end up being left with is you and you are not enough to make them a success in today's market.

 Realm pride????   .. Honestly the type of people playing this game do NOT care about "realm pride". Even on the RP server.

 Imagine DAOC with the Alb zerg vs Mid with no hibs around to ally against the albs... That's whats happening on many servers right now.

 It's like playing a stacked game of team fortress 2 where the other team has 3 more players AND have +15% damage AND have a higher skill level. You know what happens then? People leave the game.

 Unfortunatly, the huge grind and lack of ability to switch realms means... they quit for good!

For its time, yes DAoC was a success.  WoW changed the metric of what's considered a 'success' today, but they had the advantage of drawing in all their Warcraft and Diablo fans.  That they also provided by far the most polished PvE experience also didn't hurt.

It should also be noted that for a long time (until ToA), DAoC pvp was largely gear non-dependent.  But yes, gear cockblocks are a problem.  Mythic was pretty stupid to introduce that into their games.  You'd think they'd have learned their lesson with ToA.  Population imbalance was always the biggest problem in DAoC RvR, but there were better ways for Mythic to address that than the way they did.

If you think world pvp is the problem, then let me show you WoW's arenas.  Their idea of 'sport pvp' is some of the worst pvp I've ever seen.  In my experience, the not always fair and balanced BGs are much more popular.

World PvP isn't a problem in and of itself.  Mythic just made pretty much all the wrong choices in how to go about implementing it in WAR.

(http://nazareneblogs.org/robbie/files/2009/03/sarchasm.jpg)

Wow expanded the market and there's no doubt of that but daoc never took the #1 slot and I'm pretty sure the decline for that game was fairly rapid as well.

Wow pvp is a horrible example because it's bad, very bad. Wow was designed as a pve game and trying to balance that with pvp as well was simply a horrible idea. That's sort of my point though, if you want fair pvp, player versus player combat that people will enjoy and come back to, you need it where they feel themselves on equal footing with their opponent and that just isn't going to happen in any diku mmo.

I'm not saying just toss out all pvp in games like these but it needs to be kept either unimportant and a fun side thing like battlegrounds/scenario's or the entire game needs to be focused around it with strict controls on populations/gear.  Neither wow nor war does the latter and while wow does have 'some' enjoyable pvp it's still just a side dish at best.

In game right now more people complain about wow pvp than applaud it(thats mostly dk's and paladins) but in wow there's other stuff to do and the main focus of their playerbase is pve oriented even on pvp servers.

 In warhammer they're just proper fucked.

I disagree with this point.  ToA made gear a much bigger factor in pvp than pre-ToA did.  Pre-ToA people had little to work with and often you saw people running around with little more than epic gear, a few crafted, and a couple quest items.  It was post ToA that gear had more to do with pvp outcomes. 

I don't know how exactly Mythic missed the boat.  They had a fun rvr system in DAoC where you could destroy towers, climb walls, and fight for a dungeon.  NONE of this made it into WAR.  It's like they took the worst and most broken aspects of DAoC (PvE, Static keep seiges, lots of cc, class imbalance) and made it even worse.  I don't really know how they could look at 6 years of past history and just toss it aside.  It's not that I wanted WAR to be DAoC v2.0, it's that I had hoped that they would learn from 6 years of screw ups.  It seems the only thing they got right was Tier 1 (pseudo Thidranki) and PQ's. 

Not to play Captain Obvious, forum defender again but.. you didn't disagree with him there.

Damnit.  I missed the non. 

My mistake. 

I think we have reached the point that just about every Warhammer Online thread reaches. Its kind of funny that they all end up in this same place.

All roads lead to "Mythic fucked up and didn't learn a damn thing from DAoC".

WAR is just a bad game.  You can't draw many conclusions from bad game design.  PVE being more popular than PVP has been said for years, but more people play on a WoW PVP server than a PVE server (or did last time I checked), but you can't really draw many conclusions from WoW either because although it's a good game, it's not a good PVP game.

Increase exp gain!

I ask so little and get so much less.

I think WAR is an example of how missing the mark by a small margin still makes for a bad game.  Tabula Rasa suffered the same fate.  So did AoC... but it's at least making a comeback.  

I really don't think WAR is off by a lot.  They're just unwilling to move in a direction that will help.  They're too focused on catering to the hardcore because keeping what they have appears a safer gamble than making a major change.  Maybe NGE scared off a few people from the "let's make a radical change" camp.  

 What makes PvP in WOW do well is that if you want it you got it.  Its always there and if you have 20 minutes and want to PvP you can do just that.  Hey I got time before the raid, Ill go do a quick AB.  It also does well because its a nice distraction from PvE, a break as it were.  However the whole idea of PvP in WOW is pointless and repetitive.  You're not fighting for your side, you do it for gear and tokens.  

What the people who want games to be more realistic don't realize is that historical, REAL war wasn't fought by two sides that were even close to equal. The whole point of tactics and strategy is to make it as easy as possible to achieve a favorable outcome for your side. Most battles weren't fought between even remotely equal sides. The zerg rush WAS the best strategy, because if you could get 15x more troops than your opponent, it didn't matter how good they were on an individual basis. You don't want realistic warfare in PVP games, you want both sides to have a chance to win and a chance to recover.

Hell, even PLAY2CRUSH Shadowbane resets the server when one side gets too powerful.

It took a couple years for DAOC to hit its decline phase, and WTF, now a game has to be #1 to be a success?

EQ was several years old when daoc came out if I remember right and there wasn't much competition out there. Of course a game doesn't need to be number one to be a success but Daoc failed to upset even an aging diku.  I also want to add I don't feel wow so much expanded the market as tapped into it. I think even during the eq days there was a bigger market than they knew but the games were just too niche and catassy to tap into it. Daoc's biggest failing in garnering more subscribers than they could, being in my opinion the pvp-centric nature of it.

Again though with the caveat that there's nothing wrong with a game being under 500k or even 100k subs, just don't expect more with focus on an imbalanced pvp system.

Also, HaemishM said exactly what I was thinking in better words.

I was saying the same mantra. However, the more I thought about it I’ve come to the conclusion that Mythic didn't take much from what they learned from DAOC because they were too concerned on how they could entice WOW player base over to their side.  Just look at the design of the battlegrounds, there is no way they can tell me those were not designed to entice the chase your tail PVP style of WOW.  This was supposed to be a siege game, one focused on RVR, but instead what we ended up with is the best XP and RP gains in BG’s which appeal to the “WOW” type PVP player base.   Coincidence, I think not. The battlegrounds should have been designed similar to DAOC style which leads players into "how to siege" not capture a damn flag.   Leave the flags where they belong, in a FPS game. 

WoW in my opinion has ruined the MMO market because instead of designers actually giving a damn about creating a new gaming experience they care about how they can pull those millions of customers from blizzard.  I personally would of much rather of had EA/Mythic take their new graphics and overlay them on DAOC classic servers then of created this hunk of garbage. 

Radical changes do have a high chance of tanking a game.

WAR doesn't need big changes.  It does need to stop making stupid ones though.  And to fire Barnett.  I'm leery of giving them money while he's still on the payroll.

How are these changes 'radical'?
1. Lower EXP Requirement.
2. Remove Ward restrictions to end game content.

I find nothing hardcore about Warhammer gameplay or raiding, it was just a real grinding experience where even hitting 40 isn't enough to unlock the whole end game content which was supposedly focused on RVR. You still had to raid rinse repeat for set pieces so the capital city guards don't one shot you from range.

I admit it's not going to make the game so much better, but at least more people would stay and explore the game more before giving up post T2 or simply got sick of the soulcrushing bash the keep door just to gear up. Their PVE sucks dick, yet they still implement more features that made it worse. They can't possibly blame the players for finding the game not good enough to stay subbed.


The following error or errors occurred while posting this message:
Warning - while you were typing 3 new replies have been posted. You may wish to review your post.  <--- :awesome_for_real:  :heartbreak:

I disagree, Mythic learned quite a bit from DAoC.  What they didn't learn is that giving people exactly what they want it a really bad idea.


Right, the fact that games don't have any real form of permadeath renders tactics a moot point.

I think you have exactly wrong what kept DAOC from bigger success. It wasn't DAOC's PVP that was the problem. It was the PVE, even pre-expansions. It was grindy and boring. I guarantee that stopped more players from playing than anything PVP-related.

As for competition, there was EQ, UO, AC, AO, and a whole series of games that were supposed to be "DAOC killers" - Shadowbane, SWG, Planetside, etc., etc., etc. None of them ever killed it until WoW came along. I'm sorry but this business about DAOC being a failure is and has always been utter nonsense. DAOC was a success and a notable one for its time. Where failure comes in is Mythic's failure to take DAOC and build a good modern MMO on that foundation.

I think what it really boils down to is: What makes pvp 'fair'?  I would submit that the threshold for a majority of people is actually pretty low.  People want to think they have a good chance of winning any particular engagement.  That means that 1) one side can't easily overwhelm the other(s), 2)  players hate losing control of their characters and 3) the very fastest way to have players lose interest in your pvp is if they die extremely fast.

This isn't rocket science, but it's stunning how often developers get this stuff wrong.  I already talked about how Mythic fucked up point 1.  Point 2 is pretty easy: minimize CC as much as possible.  Point 3: if characters are dying in 5 seconds or less, even the 'squishy' ones, then you've failed in your pvp design because people will get frustrated and leave.  Blizzard fucked up points 2 and 3.  CoX did as well, but that game is even more comically a pve game with ham-fisted pvp forced onto it.  I don't know how badly Mythic did with points 2 and 3 but since they completely fucked up point 1, it doesn't really matter.  Guild Wars probably did the best on all 3 points and is easily the most fun, balance pvp I've experienced, but there's no world to it.  Note: the pvp in GW is fun in spite of the lack of a world, not because of.  I haven't really been following it, but I'm interested in seeing how GW2 shapes up.

:uhrr:


Imagine the patch where they finally decrease XP requirements to sane ammounts, that is, cut it to 25% of what is currently asked. The shitstorm would be epic.

Shit, if they actually cut it by that much, even I'd probably give it another month.

The clearest example of this is WAR's whole 'attack the capital city' idea.  Players in DAoC begged to be able to break through the RvR zone gates and storm the opposing capital cities.  Mythic made this a central premise in WAR and we see how well that idea is working out.


This.  It wasn't the PvP that stopped DAoC from overtaking EQ, it was the awful PvE and the enormous barrier to the endgame it provided.

I wasn't suggesting WAR needed radical changes, that's why I say that it didn't miss the mark by much.  I was just using NGE as an example of what Lantyssa supported. 

WAR needs some solid foundational changes though.  The addition of "mythic seconds" to cast times and the effects of lag jumping to exploit geometry are among them. 

Wut?  A small force can take out a large force by hitting them in strategic points to disable their support and break morale.  In WAR the only thing it does is cause the people to respawn at the warcamp and call more people in and also get the zerg to roflstomp you.  The only reason crap like that worked in DAoC was because of the CC and time it took to get back to a fight.

This again speaks to the idea that Mythic would have been well served to enlist the services of a psychologist in their efforts to create a PvP game.  There are so many variables here that it is difficult to say what people are going to enjoy.  It seems like most of your casual types will see the stronger side kicking them out of the city for a while as more of a nuisance than something that would give that "revenge factor" that I think Mythic was intending.  This type of negative reinforcement rarely works, particularly for something people are expecting to enjoy.  Then you factor in the types of people that will enjoy the possibility of making the other side suffer in some way and you are going to get more of the sadistic weirdo types on one side, thus leading to likely imbalances in the population.  The funny thing is that morale plays a huge role in the tabletop Warhammer game, yet they didn't even bother to explore the morale factor of the online players at all.  It seems Blizzard has this gambler's reward type system figured out.  Maybe Mythic should give them a call.

It was a different story this side of the pond, unless you were Sidi'd up with perfect SC gear and the must-have quest drops, you were never going to get in the cool groups, then when TOA made Sidi/Galladoria/TG obsolete the new baseline moved north again. There was however a clear and significant bar to clear before you were considered a 'proper RvR capable character' even pre-TOA.

I have been playing recently, and the character I ended up sticking with was Marauder. Anyway, he is level 19 now, and the time needed to level is horrible. Well maybe not really, but it feels that way, cause the PVE is so stale and the PVP is so lacking.

Then I ran out of rested EXP, and my server currently has the +20% bonus.

It kicked me in the fact what its going to be like t3, with none of those bonuses.

You should also consider that Marauders are one of the best leveling AoE classes in the game. Were you playing a zealot, it'd take you about 20sec to down a mob in t2. More if it carries a shield.

Morfiend likes to get me into games then take off two weeks later for another game.   Think we have gone through the gambit of MMO trials in the last 2 months Ha.

The increased performance and RVR in tier 1 got me excited. I should have known that t3 would kick our asses.

From my perspective, Spellcrafting was an awesome addition because it did go to great lengths to equalize the gear factor.   However, I really disagree with this.  I distinctly remember being able to cap 4 stats, get 25% to all resists, and decent +skills on my reaver in just 99% OC'ed SC'ed gear and some quest items.  It was expensive, but that's what DF was for.  Get the seals, salvage/trinket the BP, sell it to a vendor.

Haemish's point is the heart of RvR issues. Players want a fair war that they have a good chance of winning. This isn't possible for every player on the battlefield. Some players get to be the grunts who die first, or killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It's why I get a laugh out of the term 'meaningful PvP/ RvR'. If it means something, you can be guaranteed that side that stacks the deck the most in their favour - the zerg being the best example because it requires the least coordination - is going to win and then the other side loses something meaningful. That side, who pays $15 a month, then gets pissed off and quits (or a proportion of them do). The side who wins then has further advantage in winning again. The cycle repeats. (EVE shows you need plenty of people and plenty of space to keep this cycle going between 2 - 3 sides of roughly similar size. Also: lots of drama.)

PvP only really works in this way if every battle is somehow even and then it is player skill that determines victory, not numbers or gear, and the losers have a chance of getting back into the game.

Oh, and WAR is a great game to learn from - about how mainstream players react to these kind of mechanics. In short: not well.

Remember this?

(http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/12/4c/488d810ae7a0ebbeab259110.L._AA230_.jpg)

Isn't this pretty much the same thing as saying that only Deathmatch FPSes work?  Your definition is impossible to attain in a persistent, non-FPS MMO. 

And EVE.

I'm amazed that more MMO game designers - some of whom are likely also huge wargamers AND military history buffs - haven't thought through what the history of human conflict tells them about how they should design their game for mass PvP.

Perhaps they're looking at the wrong examples?

"Hey, you know after having their capital city flattened back to level one having to sign a humiliating and punitive peace treaty, Order Germany harnessed the awesome power of realm pride to come right back out fighting and retake tier 4 Europe!"

Yeah I Godwinned a WAR thread...

Sooo... you're saying we should start gassing the Elves pre-emptively just to shorten the process?

This is a good idea regardless of realm pride.

The raid leader started out strong, but set two major guilds on KOS at the same time.

And I agree with the example if Order gets a massive industrial base on which to rebuild.  :grin:

Was it WAR that was going to have NPCs fill out rosters to even up fights?  Make NPCs with real AI, not this watered down MMO AI I like to bitch about, and it'd be like adding bots to a FPS match to add bodies and even up the sides.  Really, if you want PvP, then it's okay to steal some FPS concepts.

What does Italy Tilea have to do with this?   (DoW was one of my first armies and was seriously wonky though pikes were  :heart:)

Ya, it was a something hyped when they first talked about WAR.  It seemed to be thrown out the window about the same time they decided to add keeps.  Given how much trouble their shitty AI has given them, I doubt they were up to the task.  But technically speaking, Guild Wars proves it is a feasible task.

And people used to think relic resets were draconian and unfair. Oh how times change.

DAoC was a picture of balance perfection until ToA, compared to WAR.

- 3 sides, for obvious reasons
- strategy and tactics mattered in every fight of any scale, hell even in roaming
- scouting, reporting, coordination in real-time were essential. A larger force would often be beaten by a better coordinated and organized side.
- keep structure, access points, wall climbing, destructible walls, stacking rams, repairs, upgrades, placing seige where you wanted and needed it most gave variety.
- until ToA, gear mattered only in that everyone bothered getting their Epics and some crafted pieces. It was possible for anyone without ridiculous effort. The RvR was expected that you had this decent easily-obtained stuff. So no, gear was not a blocking factor in the first 2 years of DAoC.

If you want to talk about DAoC's golden years, please stop refering to anything from ToA onward.

Actually, the classic rules servers were, in many ways, superior to the golden years.  I was there for both. 

Agreed. I also thought Catacombs as an expansion was pretty good. So having everything they did minus ToA made for a rather fun game, imo.

Tethered buffs, right?  Buffbots were the one thing I hated so much about DAoC that I ended up quitting over them.

No buffbots was the best feature of Gareth, etc., yeah. Better even than lack of TOA imo.

Once again we seem to be back to "WTF where they thinking?". Its like they took everything that was good about DAoC, and left it out.

To be fair, there were still plenty of buffbots.  They were just in tow or hidden in bridge towers or under water.  Quite a few stealthers also hid them in the labyrinth or in nearby towers or keeps.

Man, buffbots. Where portal keeps had relic siege sized armies of AFK clerics.

Launch DAOC had issues (no RAs, no CC immunity timers, AE stun laughs abounded!), but spellcrafting was an amazing addition that invalidated most of the shitty pve grind in order to say "hey, the point of the game is over THERE"

WAR took that and went "we need epic dungeons and tiers of capped content gear. Because being the only MMO company to make popular servers that REMOVED and expansion means we should repeat it's huge mistakes"

You guys are gonna go crazy trying to find the method to Mythic's madness.  There isn't any. 

Buffbots made them a lot of money ;)

Classic servers were great. The planned server for the 'invasion' rule set would have been a great indicator of the debacle that is WAR's end game. However, I find for some reason that ever elusive phrase 'realm pride' was very strong in DAOC and for some reason almost non existent in WAR.

Thats not true, have you seen how much pride Destro takes in whining about Bright Wizards?

I honestly think that DAoC with an invasion server wouldn't have been nearly as bad as this is. It relates back to the 3 realms vs 2, also the fact that all the players would have back up banks, crafting areas/merchants, housing, dungeons, etc (especially with how good housing was in that game, imo). I honestly thought it was a good idea for WAR too, or I did back when they had 3 capitols per side. Seeing the time it takes to invade a single capitol, having a backup or two for the losing team would mean they aren't as fucked as they currently are by losing their one and only capitol. Although, even with that change the game would still be shit, but at least they wouldn't have to worry as much about losing people over not having any capitol at all as the losing side wouldn't feel be completely fucked.

Darkness Rising (I think that was the name of that little expansion) was actually pretty cool too. The main flaw was all three realms had basically the same storyline for the overreaching quest, which was sort of dumb, but it was kind of nice to have a little campaign to spice up the PvE a little.

Goddammit, Mythic. ><

I still can't figure out how Mythic can take a game and make it pretty on the outside and ugly on the inside, while a low budget company like Aventurine can make a game ugly on the outside and pretty on the inside ( faction-wise). Maybe its because its pretty much all they have to do in Darkfall, but those people there really seem to want to kill each other without any carrot waving.  Has anyone read any of those alliance report briefings?

I always wondered what kind of game this would have been if Skaven, Order, Greenskins etc.. all behaved like guilds and alliances do in Darkfall.  Every guild/faction for themselves, until they start getting rolled.

Advertine was aiming for a niche market.  Mythic was aiming to take on WoW. 

They need to work on their aim.

If you've ever visited a unisex restroom, you know how guys think about aiming. Also, the mess made generally relates to the size of the prick and Barnett is one of the largest I've seen.

3 realms versus 2 is a huge difference that many will downplay in importance.  It provides a level of unpredictability on a broad scale that WAR could use.  Sure, one side will probably get beat up on more than the other two, but that is okay.  Right now, the broad WAR game is terribly predictable and exceedingly complex in all the wrong areas.  Tying all the PVE aspects in the game into the zone locks was unbelievably stupid.

Three realms + lessen the grind. 

Replay value goes up.  Realm dominance shifts.  Gameplay scenery and variety improves. 

Hey... sounds like DAoC v2.0.  Now we're back to the point where all these threads circle to. 

I can tell you where War is circling to............. :grin:

3 realms as oppoised to 2, and make the reward for RvR be RvR related, like the relics were.

How is that any different for the losing side? Three realms, 5 realms, 25 realms, if you are constantly the whipping boy realm, it sucks all the same no matter how many realms are beating on you.

I want to be locked out of my capital city's functionality... because losing wasn't bad enough!

Fordel - the more sides, the more chances to ally yourself up with a larger force.

I believe things would work more along the lines of an MMG Duverger's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law). If the winner gains advantage from winning, and superior numbers is all it takes, folks will tend to ally themselves with the most poweful side or its most poweful opposition... until really there are just two sides. The only way to prevent this is to have every starting "realm" be comperably powerful... and that's more likely with three realms than it is with five or twenty-five.

No matter what, it's unlikely that any single realm would consistantly be ganged up on by everybody else unless it was simultaneously popular and weak... an unlikely combination. Too few players and it's hardly worth the time to check if there's anybody to squash today. Too strong, and it won't remain either unpopular or an easy target.

Hibernia?

I'd say three sides is the sweet spot. Though I do like how every guild can be a faction in Eve.
I do wonder how a game would work if it had 3 hardcoded factions and a fourth "free for all" category for mercenaries and pirate raider types.

Emain Macha was a perfect storm of gameplay mechanics. The fastest and easiest way to fight zerg vs. zerg was to get involved in a milegate battle in the third realm. The distances involved were the most manageable that way, keeping respawn rates high. Emain Macha happened to have the most open visiblity of any RvR zone, making the zerg easy to find and accidents with monster aggro considerably less common. Since increase in realm rank was pretty directly tied to kills/hour, there was little reason to go anywhere else... and if nobody was at the other milegate, why not take the zerg to the keeps?

When Hibernia used this all to their advantage (by vulturing exhausted zergs after Albion/Midgard milegate battles or regularly rushing the keeps in the largely abandoned Albion and Midgard zones) they tended to do quite well.

Hibernia had the second highest population on Tristan, after Albion, but we always did better than either realm.

Hence the intrigue factor in Eve, something a lot of other games don't have. 

Until all the sides are chosen and your still at the bottom, getting waffle stomped. The only thing 3 realms did for the "loser" realm in DaoC 90% of the time, was let the loser realm get screwed from multiple directions.


Even in EVE, with it's multitude of forces, it still ends up at its base with the larger and/or superior force just rolling all over the weaker one.

Alex, I'm going to go with "what is the drain?"

How did the weaker realm in DAoC get stomped? Maybe they lost their relics?

Woop de do.

Its not like the players of the weaker realm can't make an 8 man and roll around looking for other 8 mans, or go over to whatever RvR area is empty and take keeps (which almost always 'produced' people to fight)

1v1v1 is simply better than 1v1 in so many ways which have already been discussed. The fact that one of the 1's might be a bit weaker and get teamed up on is SUPPOSED to happen and an accepted part of the 1v1v1 setup.

Having a 20% advantage in healing, cast dps, and melee dps mattered... a lot.  Losing all of your relics sucked, especiall when one realm had all 6.  The relic system made the three realm aspect seem broken when it was really the relic system that needed a fix. 

What i want to know is why pvp can't have effects that don't directly relate to gameplay?  Maybe have a realm getting defeated just turn their hometown into a smoking rubble or have a ruined look while still being functional. Or have progressive victories build up your own city so that it looks more grand or allow player armor to look nicer.

Why does it always turn into a stats fest with world pvp and mythic? People who care about pvp will still pvp to restore a city, they dont need loot rewards for it. There's always pve for loot.

One realm having all six and keeping them wasn't that common though - especially in NF when taking enemy relics and defending captured relics became a lot harder. Remember the baseline was no bonus. If you lost your relics, you didn't suffer any penalty only a captured relic gave your side a bonus and only if you still had your own relic of the same type.

If one side had all 6 relics, then both the other sides had an incentive to team up and reclaim their property, very few servers were so grossly unbalanced that both the smaller sides couldn't successfully raid the larger realm.

The relic bonuses made a difference of course but, in general situational factors made more of a difference in most fights, only the solo scene was heavily affected by relic balance.

What usually happened was 3 power in one realm, 3 strength in the other (or 4:2 with one realm owning all their relics) with the third realm never owning their own keeps, relics and not having any ability to impact the RvR aspect of the game.

I would still argue that the DAOC system is much preferable to the current WAR 2 faction system.  You bring up points that show that the DAOC 3 faction system isn't perfect, but nothing will be absolutely perfect.  What you have in WAR now is complete predictability. 

WAR tried to be a hybrid between WoW and DAoC and got neither half right.  The game is terrible outside of the first tier and even there it has some serious issues. 

Which is why you all should join me back in AoC. Just sayin'

AoC scared me away in an almost identical way... great first 20 levels and then MEH!  If the endgame has improved significantly, I may consider it.

And Mythic are too stubborn or clueless or both to properly fix it. Convo over, what's for dinner?

Got out of Tortage on 3 different characters now, and loving both Cimmeria and Stygia. Can't compare it to how it was, since I didn't play at release, but the trial accounts and people who are return keep constantly commenting about how it's a completely different game now. Frequent requests for classes for raids in global.

It's not like you've any other mmo to play right now  :grin:

Well, there is THE WEST !!! (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=16328.0)

Yea, 3 sides wasn't any more unpredictable either.

"Alb zerg at AMG, attack zerg and wait for Tiny mid group to hit us from behind. Rinse, Repeat"


Having multiple sides is fun for a Lore/RP thing, or simply a variety thing, but it doesn't actually do much in terms of population/realm balance. Not unless you somehow artificially force the odd side out to prefer hitting the 'winner' instead of just going with the path of least resistance.

well a friend of mine mused before he quit that destruction, despite being dominating should at least suffer some division amongst themselves...so allow pvp between destro players etc. If at least to slow them down and to make it more difficult to coordinate heheh. (Dead people less Competition for Gold Chest WOOOOHOO)

Hah, that would make for some interesting posts. "So here we were at this Fort about to drop the Lord and all the Dark Elves start stabbing the Chaos and Orcs in the face, Shamans and Zealots died first, everyone else followed then the Lord killed the remaining Dark Elves and we all died. Never took the Fort... fucking Slaanesh bitches. Never trust a Dark Elf."

This guy has the best points of all. I'm not sure what Mythic plans to do about it.

My guild, when we were zerg dominating on one server, re-rolled on another server (to play the underdog).

Btw, everything is available even if your city is unavailable, you still have your bank, auction house, trainers, etc. The only thing that isn't available are city PVE dungeons (and most of you don't like the PVE, including myself, so who cares).

Levelling is already very easy. I levelled from 38-40 with 3 hours per level (rested XP). That was pretty easy.

Except those dungeons have the best gear for RvR.

Running with a premade in RvR or doing hard PQ's in a good group? 

Solo it takes days of casual play to do that.  I play about 2hr a night and I can get one level every day or two which seems slow because 9 levels of each tier you're essentially worthless. 

Relics were described as a '20%' bonus but to this day I don't know where that number came from. The actual impact was much more significant than that, having 3 caster relics basically meant your casters were capping damage on just about every cast.

I do prefer I think multiple sides to just 2, but Fordel is right, with multiple sides if you're on the bottom it *really* sucks, especially with no population controls. One of the last relic defenses I was on in DAOC before I left, the #2 realm had more people in our frontier than our entire side had logged on at all at any level. Basically a PUG raid came along and retook a relic that had taken us multiple days of planning and organization just to get enough people together to try for it. And there were other realms out on other servers that were in even worse shape than us.

Being the bottom sucks no matter how many sides there are.  One realm might get to alternate between good and bad, and the best realm might still wind up losing if the other two join forces.

The five realms in MPBT3025 actually worked really well since the factions were in a big circle and it was easy for the smaller Houses to gain back lost territory when the others were fighting amongst themselves.  There was also a lot of realm loyalty.  Affiliation really seemed to matter on a personal level.

I don't really agree with it being "more significant" then advertised, and thought they did the 20% correctly (almost perfectly from what I remember, and I used to be someone who watched my damage logs since I was always changing specs....those stones were damn expensive at times ><). The only acception that made the relics seem to have a larger affect then advertised was when you had 3 power relics (for example) and were hitting someone for 1200 with them while being hit for 1000, and the person you were hitting now has them and is hitting you for 1200 and you're hitting them for 1000 now. That 400 point shift definitely hurt and would be more then a 20% difference, only due to your loss of the 20%


That is exactly why it would have worked in WAR, they do have population caps that actually worked (as people will rediscover if WAR ever stops sucking ass enough to regain a good number of people). If they raised that max number for each realm, threw a third realm on a server, and had opened with less servers I still think that would have been a great move. No, it wouldn't have been a perfect solution for one realm being too low on numbers, but it would have been great from keeping any realm from having far too many people. Odd to say since in this case that doesn't automatically equal the same thing, but they are still closely related.

The power relics had some funky interaction with casting bonuses, way more then 20%. FinTree really slowed down that afternoon we didn't have all 3  :oh_i_see:

Yeah, 3-5 casters losing their 20% bonus does have a more noticeable affect at fins compared to 1, and now a rotating star!  :star:

This is why only FFA PvP works.  Infinite sides of 1 each!  :awesome_for_real:

No, it really was more than just a 20% boost to damage. The mechanics of it were very weird, it worked more like an acuity stat buff/+skills type thing or whatever than just a flat muliplier on damage. The end result was that even partially specced baseline nukes and such would start hitting their damage caps. A lot of testing on it was done at the time - I don't remember the exact details but I'm not speaking from some sort of anecdotal experience where I got nuked to death and QQed on a forum.  :-P

Really, he wanted them for his AE Hammerz attack on his Thane.

As I recall (and it's been a while so my memory could be faulty), the relic bonus acted as an acuity buff (except it stacked with other acuity bonuses and wasn't subject to the normal stat cap) because if it was a straight 1.2 multiplier on all damage then spells would suddenly start hitting for more than their cap which would be bad.

Because of the way variance worked, it was quite easy to hit cap even on partially trained spec lines (especially with ToA boni), the relic bonus practically guaranteed that you'd be hitting at or close to cap every time if you were level 50 and your spec level was at least 35.

Weird, I could have sworn it was just about 20% from what I remember. Oh well


And wow, I forgot the last time I heard a Thane joke. Now, I'll await a Smite Cleric joke to make this thread complete!   :why_so_serious:

The worst nerf of all time in DAoC was when they changed the graphics on that spell from one hammer on each target to just one hammer period.  :heartbreak:

God, my favorite part of these threads is that they always turn into how boss DAoC was. And it makes me want to play DAoC because I mostly missed out on it. Instead I got to play WAR.

It's proof that nostalgia is better than actual gameplay experience.  DAoC was fun under the right conditions.  It certainly wasn't all that. 

Srsly. DAOC had a lot of fun struggling to get out from underneath unfun of various kinds. Then Mythic decided to end that struggle and just crown unfun the official winner.

For those of us who despised EQ, DAOC was our first 3-D Diku. It was for me. I have no desire to go back, though. I have no starry eyed nostaligia, and there are better games out there now. Or worse ones that are at least more interesting.

FFA PvP has never resulted in "infinity sides of 1 person".  It results in "optimal sized zerg vs hapless opponents".

That statement is equally true for PvP games that have defined sides.

It was months before I actually quit, but after that faceroll of a relic raid took our relics, I lost interest in the game. What was the point of trying?

Maybe if Teske didn't cry wolf so many times!

Stunguard, stealth zergs, enchanter with stun+debuff+nuke+nuke+nuke, PBAoE, warlocks instangibbing people, smite clerics, heros with slam and then pulling a shield, pre nerf left axe, bainshees, animists at milegates, rogues in chain with red pets.

What else did I miss?

Remember staying stealthed if you one shot killed someone? Oh that was fun. Scouts able to slam you from stealth and stand point blank and crit shot you at least 2-3 times before the stun wore off. Oh and you forgot Vamps in general. Dragonfang. Armor table changes mid way through the game. ToA.

Edit: I'd still take all DAOC's faults during its prime over WAR.

Yes, how could I forget when scale armor, which has ovelapping plates designed to ward off slashing weapons suddenly became weak to slash?  All because friars could kill unbuffed heros.  I also remember how scouts could setup a crit while in stealth armor.  But yes, DAoC in general was a far more fun game than WAR was, but that may be because I was more naive back then. 

Then again, preToAm the game was good.  In classic DAoC, you could get your epic armor, a crafted weapon, and then go hit the Frontiers.  SI had Spellcrafting and Alc, but that made the gear even less important since everyone was essentially running around in the same gear.  Then ToA hit. 

While DAOC had its flaws it was still more fun most of the time than not pre-toa.  WAR once the "new" goes away and it does fast, you have bad pve, wow scenarios, and completely garbage end game featuring pve farming in what was advertised as a rvr/pvp game.  Mythic learned nothing at all with what they did wrong with DAOC. 

They had a perfect example of how to lose 50% of your player base over 6 months with TOA, I guess they improved upon that losing more than 60% of its player base in WAR in a record 3 months from launch :facepalm:

Awesome.  That's so going in the sig.

My personal favorite, was that (at the time) Hib only special realm ability on enchanters, that boosted your resists up to like 98% for 30 seconds or whatever.


I want to know what the reaction was from the Spiritmaster that PBAE'd me for 9 (448 resisted) damage.  :awesome_for_real:

I'd disagree with that statement.  I think many of the design decisions in WAR can be tied back to many complaints with DAoC.  What they didn't learn was trying to be the big dog at launch is a failure.

It was certainly not awesome for real, I can tell you that much. It was, shit shit fuck fuck /release

Mythic tried to reinvent way too much from DAoC.

Hindsight is 20/20.  I distinctly remember forum warriors bitching that there were too many factions and 2 were better than 3.  I was one of them.

The most devastating effect wasn't even the damage reduction, it was the virtual CC immunity. Minute long mezzes lasting oh, 3 seconds.

Yeah if you were Supp spec for the PBAE you had an awesome single target mez that was basically shit with that... so you run in, realize almost all your damage was resisted quick cast your single target mez and well, that was the end of that. Between the SM and my SB I learned the hard way not to fall in love with shit classes and play a multitude.

That talent was horribly overpowered and made anything and everything magical worthless. Literal "We-Win" button. Insult to injury was that it was on the class that could debuff it's own damage type for single target nuking AND have full blown PBAE shenanigans.


I played a Sword and Board hero for like, 4 years. None of that LargeWeapon shit for me!

You know which "We-Win*" button I loved?  The original Speed of Sound.

Ok, it was usually more of a "We-Don't-Lose" button.

There some other RA it was combined with that made Alb GG insane.  I don't remember what it was though.

Oh yeah, Reaver bombs were always my favorite.

The original Bunker of Faith.

Yep.  Bunker of Faith + Speed of Sound.  From talks I had with people who ran gank groups during that era, they'd rotate clerics and minstrels so that it would be always available.

Don't forget about group purge though.  I used to hear much swearing and cursing about that as well.