New DAoC expansion - with Horses

[AlteredOne]

The artifacts ARE leveled in pvp.

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

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.

[Llava]

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.

[HRose]

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.

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.

[chinslim]

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.

[Llava]

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.