Can I have an extra side of catass with my grind? Thanks.

[Shockeye]

Master Levels not enough of a grind for you? Add some Champion levels on top of it!

Darkness Rising will introduce several new systems that will add to the player's ability to customize and tweak their characters. First and foremost, with the introduction of player mounts, our players will finally be able to charge into battle. By earning a class-specific champion weapon, our players will be able to increase their combat power, and visually showcase their achievements to everyone around them. And finally, by earning Champion Levels, our players will be able to earn sub-classing abilities that will enable them to add some custom abilities to their arsenal.

...

The systems in Darkness Rising will allow players to expand their high-end characters with new sub-classing abilities and new Champion weapons. While we won't be directly changing our RvR areas with an expansion, these new abilities and weapons will have an effect on the RvR game.

[eldaec]

Seriously, how do they manage to come up with such vapid non-questions?

Other than that, if CLs are instanced 1fg ToA style raids, without idiotic bouts of drop farming, pre-quests, and spawn timers, then it shouldn't cause anyone a problem.

All the problems with the ToA ML-quests are related to lack of instancing, leading to stupid arrangements for drop farming, pre-quetss, and spawn timers.

I have no doubt you will need a guild to move through CLs efficiently. But you need the guild to be effective in RvR anyway, and have done forever.

[Paelos]

If you can grind both MLs and CLs, people will. It doesn't erase ToA, it simply adds more to tedium to the normal game unless they can actually make it "fun." So far everything DAOC focused on for the PvE end hasn't been fun to me. I don't even care about the PvE part, as most people don't in the game. ALL expansions should be directly linked to improving PvP through pvp changes, rewards, quests, instances, or various fixes.

In other words, drop the PvE expansion idea you numbnuts!

[schild]

Hahaha. All your ass are belong to cats.

[Soln]

Jonric: Why should online gamers who never played Dark Age of Camelot consider trying it, either now or after Darkness Rising? And why should former players think about returning?

Walter Yarbrough: Well...

10/10 for Mythic to add new high-end content to keep their 22k existing customer base, whom I presume are all lvl50.  But minus several millions for not changing with current trends to get people off the grind and into new skill-testing content.  Sorry but I'm in a shitty mood.  And I'm still pissy over playing that game >1.5yrs and never getting to lvl50, and thus never RvR'ing, and thus never getting to the end-game... /dismiss

[Nebu]

I've been playing this game a long time (since beta) and run a strong regular group.  I can tell you that NOONE is looking forward to this expansion.  Not a single person that I know in game is excited about this or even thinks any of it is a good idea.  Maybe this is just the thing I need to finally break my addiction.  Were it not for the fact that artifacts and ML levels are are just a bad memory and my gaming is pretty much log on and run in RvR with 7 friends, I would have quit sooner.

[Shockeye]

I'll admit it, part of my bias against DAoC probably stems from never wasting enough time to grind to level 50. I can't say I regret it though.

[WayAbvPar]

I quit at 24 and never looked back. The patch to 'correct' the group experience broke my will to play. I had started a new support class character to help my buddies (abandoning my 24th level champion). Suddenly I couldn't group with them without crippling XP gains for all involved. /cancel

[WindupAtheist]

Shit, look, I've got it all figured out.  All they need to do to beat WoW is move DAoC's setting into the modern age.  Instead of Albion, Hibernia, and Midgard, you put in England, Ireland, and Scotland.  Then you spend months grinding away in your faction's pubs, getting drunk and having bar-fights.  Once you've leveled up your blood-alcohol content high enough, you go out to the Stadium (frontier) and fight soccer riots against the other factions.  It'll own.

[Hoax]

Well hell I played a Blademaster (omfg gimped class alert) and quit at like 36, I mean at launch I've never seen such whacked class balance.

[Der Helm]

I would subscribe to a game that would let me beat up english, irish and scottish soccer fans. Damm isle apes look all the same too me anyway.

[Raguel]

With respect to the title of the thread, I thought the same thing when I saw this on another site. 

[Xanthippe]

Good lord.  I guess the devs who loved ToA and thought it was a Great Idea are the only ones left working at Mythic.  Nothing else explains this lunacy.  Oh, unless they're actually trying to lose subscribers.

What a completely wrong direction to take this game.

I played DAOC for 3 years, got a couple toons to 50, and even continued after the debacle that was ToA, just thinkin' and wishin' and hopin' and prayin' that Mythic would somehow come to its collective senses and fix it.  It appears that its collective senses all moved on to other jobs and other companies.

[Shockeye]

I wonder if their new non-ToA server will have the new expansion enabled or not.

[Strazos]

I played DAoC for about a month at some point within the last 2 years.

The PvE was abyssmal. There were fucking Buffbots everywhere, and hardly any low-level people, cause if you wanted a new toon, you used you /level.

I never got high enough on my own to see any PvP. It's a shame.

Though I do remember liking how rogues worked, but was then told that no one wanted my DPS.



Someone needs to fix all MMO's so that it's not impossible to jump in by yourself far after release. The way it is now, if you're not around during the first year or two, it's nigh impossible to start fresh, because no one is playing that low-level content anymore.

[MrHat]

Someone needs to fix all MMO's so that it's not impossible to jump in by yourself far after release. The way it is now, if you're not around during the first year or two, it's nigh impossible to start fresh, because no one is playing that low-level content anymore.

That's why it's important to have fun, solo-able play.

[Strazos]

Someone needs to fix all MMO's so that it's not impossible to jump in by yourself far after release. The way it is now, if you're not around during the first year or two, it's nigh impossible to start fresh, because no one is playing that low-level content anymore.

That's why it's important to have fun, solo-able play.

I don't neccessarily want that either. I like grouping.

[Xanthippe]

I did have fun with the pve when I started playing DAOC.  It was within a couple of weeks after launch, so there were plenty of people to group with.  I convinced a few friends from a mud to come play with me, and we levelled up together despite not knowing what we were doing nor how to do it.  Managing aggro? Huh?  Pulling?  Nisse's was a blast with all the trains coming up to the entrance.

When I started an alt a year later, though, it was already difficult to find people to group with because by then not only were the zones largely empty, but you had to be just the right kind of player needed or forget it - the min/maxing had started.

Is it just me who thinks min/maxing ruins games?  Suppose there was a game that min/maxers were not attracted to and hence didn't play.  What would that game look like, I wonder?

The PvP was very fun until the elite groups started.  Then I just did frontier defense, because I don't like the whole min/maxing thing of having the perfect group.  I liked the rp thing of defending my borders and preventing the savage Albs from overtaking our keeps.

The whole xp thing of grinding up at .. what's that zone in SI with those lawn gnomes in Midgard... so tedious I'd rather just buy a 50 on eBay.  It's almost the same thing, why doesn't Mythic just sell max levels to folks for $100 or whatever?  I don't know if it's really anyone's idea of fun.  I guess it's fun the way playing solitaire for hours is fun.  More like OCD therapy.

I like grouping with people but only about half the people I run into.  I don't like forced grouping - sometimes I like to play but have to go afk for unknown periods of time.  (WoW was good about this for the first 50 levels.  The game could have stopped at 50 for all I cared.)

But yeah, it'd be nice if people could somehow get to the meat of DAOC without all the crap that comes before.  An-instant-50-old-frontiers-only game is something I'd probably play.

[Raguel]

PvE + levels = tedium. Some people just have a higher toleration of tedium than others.  If Mythic had a /level 39 ( I'm a bg whore  ) I'd consider playing again.

I have to admit though I didn't think /level would cause a negative effect on the game, because I figured by that time most everyone was 45+ anyway heh. 

[Alkiera]

Someone needs to fix all MMO's so that it's not impossible to jump in by yourself far after release. The way it is now, if you're not around during the first year or two, it's nigh impossible to start fresh, because no one is playing that low-level content anymore.

That's why it's important to have fun, solo-able play.

Or go the route of CoH, where the endgame is 'roll up new characters'.  With the rate they release new content, you can even do different things in various level ranges than before.  If you're already 30+, then you can't have done the Striga Isle stuff with your main, so you roll up an alt, and when you get to 20, instead of the normal missions you did last time, you can do the Striga Isle stuff.  There is enough content there to pretty much push you thru 29 with just a little work with your normal contacts.  Issue 5 is supposed to release a similar zone for 30-39, and The Hollows is like that already for 8-15 or so.

Their system seems to allow for the min/maxer crowd( Invuln tank, emp defender, Controller, blaster x5 ) without preventing people from making odd groups and succeeding.  Friend told me about a TF where a bunch of people left in the middle, leaving behind 3 defenders.  They managed to finish the TF by themselves, with no tanks, and no real 'damage dealers'.  I've had groups with 4-5 scrappers, duo'd with a controller, with a tank, with a scrapper, etc, and while your tactics change a bit depending on what you have, no class is the 'must have'.  Even if you are a poor solo class, like an empathy defender... just about anyone else is helpful to you, and you to them.

Alkiera

[HaemishM]

Wow, yeah, Champion Levels, maybe next expansion they can have Monarch Levels, or some equally vague-sounding thing. Nice to see they get mounts in and only 4 years after release!

The level 20 battlegrounds was fun. Everything else was... not. You could solo the content, hell I soloed up to 35 by the time I quit the second time, and I was in a guild at release that got me up to 32. But the PVE just isn't fun. After the first few quests that were good, everything else was just boring and lifeless. And I'd STILL go back and play if I could play RVR on an even level without having to grind for a fucking year to do it.

[Paelos]

Seriously, can anyone here imagine...just imagine the pain of DAOC coming in ice-cold right now? It almost makes me nauseous.

[squirrel]

And I'd STILL go back and play if I could play RVR on an even level without having to grind for a fucking year to do it.

Yup -  so would i. But that's not going to happen, even on the new ToA'less servers. The grind will be worse there in some ways as a lot of the tools people use to powerlevel (which is a bad solution anyway) aren't available.

[tazelbain]

Shockeye, are you saying any large, structural charge to a game post release is bad, regardless of the merits of the change?
Big changes always alienate more players that it attracts?

EDIT: wrong thread.

[Pococurante]

A massively online game that can't evolve doesn't live long either.  If one is damned either way.

I can't picture 1997 UO having any subs today worth a used snotrag.

[sarius]

A massively online game that can't evolve doesn't live long either.  If one is damned either way.

I can't picture 1997 UO having any subs today worth a used snotrag.

Agree.  I just wish some of them didn't equivocate changing the basic rules of a system every two weeks for evolving.

[chinslim]

Then again, sub-classing is the kind of "horizontal" character development much sorely-needed in DAOC given the current state of vertical development with TOA, Realm Ranks, and cookie cutter, 1-trick pony templates.

Finally, perhaps healers who can use weapon styles or cast nukes.  Just hope it's more like a WoW priest's Mind Blast rather than a cleric's mana-sucking, slow-casting smite spell.

[Xanthippe]

I still cannot quite figure out the rationale behind this expansion.

It's not going to attract any new players, because this makes the curve even steeper between new and old.

It's going to piss off some/many/most? (choose one, it's gotta be correct) current players and lead to cancellations.

It's going to make happy the most obsessive-compulsive players who play 6+ hours a day, and prevent them from leaving - although they are prevented from leaving already by their OCD, hence they aren't going anywhere anyway.

No matter how I look at it, I don't see this as bringing in new revenue.  If my reasoning is faulty, I blame my children for interrupting me every 5 minutes while I try to compose anything.  (I'm quickly seeing the benefit of all-year school; school's only been out for not quite 2 weeks.)

Set me straight, please.  How is this going to translate to $$$ for Mythic?

[tazelbain]

Set me straight, please.  How is this going to translate to $$$ for Mythic?

IMHO, they have given up on growing their game and are focused on extracting the maxium amount of money from the addicts.

[shiznitz]

Or the developers working on DAoC now are exactly the OCD players themselves. The question that comes to my mind is not why do this expansion but why do any expansion? DAoC is a remnat. Milk it for cash and offer a bundle price with Imperator.

[squirrel]

Set me straight, please.  How is this going to translate to $$$ for Mythic?

IMHO, they have given up on growing their game and are focused on extracting the maxium amount of money from the addicts.

Agreed - and you have to give Mythic credit on understanding their own products lifecycle. Get money from the people you already own, cause WoW took everybody else...

[WindupAtheist]

WoW has rendered all other level-based games obsolete.  It's going to be a steady diet of shit sandwiches for the rest of the industry until one of them finally finds the desparation to break the mold.

[Pococurante]

Agreed - and you have to give Mythic credit on understanding their own products lifecycle. Get money from the people you already own, cause WoW took everybody else...

That's exactly my take on it as well.

[AOFanboi]

WoW has rendered all other level-based games obsolete.

Well, except the Asian grind-a-thons, which have their own niche.

But a level-free, player-interaction-oriented persistent game would be nice at some point in the not too distant future. Stop making reinterpretations of Dungeons and Dragons already!

[Nebu]

But a level-free, player-interaction-oriented persistent game would be nice at some point in the not too distant future. Stop making reinterpretations of Dungeons and Dragons already!

A Tale in the Desert was very close to this.  Unfortunately, it suffered from other issues.