Im thinking of trying DAOC but I know nothing about it.       What did TOA add to the game that so many dislike?   

Heh...this should open up a fun can of worms.....

ToA was a spectacularly bad idea on sooo many levels it is hard to even remember where to begin at this point.....

First off, start with the simplist: WTF is atlantis doing in a Norse/Northern European centric game? *everything* in DAoC before ToA and after is based in scandanavia/british isles/north atlantic isles/northern europe...the whole egyptian/atlantean thing was totally off base, jarring and out of context in a game that otherwise hung together very very well.

Gameplay-wise, ToA was old style EQ-redux. Massive raids required to accomplish many objectives, forced grinding and camping for rare drops/specific loot.

RvR-wise: abilities that "weren't going to significantly impact RvR" becoming sooooo commonplace and so overpowered that you had to acquire them to compete at all.

Obviously the 2nd and 3rd elements could be elaborated on to pages and pages of text...but that should give you the basic idea of why most players *hated* ToA. (Helps if you bear in mind that DAoCs player base was there for a few main reasons...sick of EQ, the RvR or the really cool world...ToA pissed off *all* of those elements in one expansion...)

 Not all of the problems and issues people had with TOA are still relevant as there have been changes made more recently which have, if not addressed the issues as such, at least have made it easier to obtain a lot of the rewards TOA offers

One of the major complaints was the time sink required to be able to compete in RVR, not only did Master Levels have to be gained, requiring large raids  but artifacts once obtained needed levelling often by killing a particular type of enemy and so if a player had more than 1 arti they would often find eac needed levelling separately.

This has now changed in that Bounty Points (gained from RvR) can be used to purchase master levels and artifacts, while the levelling requirements have been simplified in that any kill gives arti xp.

Thanks for the replys.  As a new player wanting to PVP, should I go classic?   Seems I would be able to finish a pvp character sooner.   

I would definately go "classic" now...the essential time sinks and raids of ToA remain and with current population levels you are unlikely to ever be able to finish them or compete.

Edit: Wow so the population really has gone to heck since I stopped following it then. In that case, I'd just avoid the game entirely and find something else then. I cannot imagine a worse DAoC experience than trying to compete on a ToA server with the last few diehard old campaigners...talk about being behind. 

Classic is currently more under-populated than TOA, as I write this there are 189 on the Bossiney (classic) cluster but 1997 on the Devon cluster.   There has been quite a population shift away from classic recently so with the alternative ways of getting around the time sinks I would go for Devon personally simply as it is far higher populated