I played DAoC from Oct 01’- spring 03’. I played after SI but left before housing. DAoC is the only MMO I ever played. I quit, not because I found greener pastures, but because the game was too addicting. In the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about playing an MMO again. I looked around online but none of them interest me so I’m thinking about coming back to DAoC. I thought that I’d offer my opinion on the whole DAoC 2 thing, because it could be a fresh (or stale/old) perspective.
There are two primary reasons why I am willing to go back to DAoC and not Wow, WAR or AION. The first is that I loved the graphics of DAoC. From what I understand, everyone now thinks that they are outdated. While that is probably true, the game looks more realistic to me and not all cartoonish. I do not like the cartoon characters of WoW and these other games. I want the characters and environment to look as real as possible. The second and most important reason I’d go back to DAoC is because in the past two weeks of hardcore reading online, I have yet to read a post from a single person stating that RvR has been done better elsewhere. RvR is why I loved DAoC. If nobody has since improved upon it, then I don’t want to waste my time playing his game.
PvE
I thought that the PvE in DAoC was perfect. In my opinion, even Darkness Falls (and the fact that everyone became more familiar with mob camps and their class abilities) began to make powerleveling too easy. Nevertheless, I still thought that the time it took to get to level 50 after SI was fine. I hear now that people can level to 50 in a few weeks or even a weekend, and that is just ridiculous. It should take at least a few months to get from 0 to 50, and that is if you dedicate yourself hardcore to that mission (buff botts, powerleveling, no RvR, no crafting, etc). The longer it takes to build your character the more you are invested in it. The more you are invested in it the less likely you are to leave the game. That is why I’m trying to track down my old level 50 and pay money for it, instead of starting from scratch—because I am attached to it and spent all that time on it.
You should always get more XP while working in groups. A soloer with a buffbot should not be able to level as fast as those who work in groups. Least XP = soling. Next to least = soloing with a buffbot (or better yet, see below) or doing a solo quest. Middle XP = doing quests with groups or killing mobs with medium sized groups. Best XP = killing mobs with full sized groups.
RvR –
There will always be a mob mentality and there will always be loner stealthers. The problem, in my opinion, was getting small groups (2-6 people) in the frontier. One idea I thought of was instead of having one port of entrance into the enemy’s frontier, you could have two separate ones. Which one you go do depends on which portal you leave in your own land (instead of having just one, install a second portal at the other entrance to your own frontier). Having two portals that take you to two separate regions of the enemy’s frontiers would help disperse the populations throughout the frontiers better. Most importantly, it would help solve the stealther camping the milegate problem. Stealthers would be less inclined to camp milegate 1 or 2, because people are also filtering in through milegates 3 and 4. And if you keep getting killed by the same toons camping the same spot, you could simply transport over to the other side of the frontier. Oh yeah, and there needs to be 3 realms not 2.
Crafting-
No drop should ever be as good as the best crafted piece. A 1,000 skilled amorcrafter who makes a masterpiece should be better than ANY drop in the game. But a masterpiece should be 1 in 100 attempts. I do believe that there needs to be an incentive to fight dragons and what not, though. So maybe they could have drops that equal to the best crafted armor, OR, slightly less equal but have cool effects (glow or something else silly) that crafted items cannot. I left before housing, but from what I understand it isolated people. Housing should be placed in the capital city, with a communal forge for all the houses. Also, if you are going to have in-game merchants maybe the NPC merchant can collect a fee (10% or 20% or something) from the crafter with each item it sells. This means that it is more expensive to buy from a merchant so people will wait to contact real people in game to get a better price. But it also allows you to buy from an NPC in an emergency if you need to.
Expansions-
Thoroughly test EVERYTHING on the test server for an adequate amount of time so you get feedback on it. When I played the test server (Pendragon ) hardly had anyone play it. Maybe you could entice people to play on this server by allowing them to transfer any gold/money they make on Pendragon to their normal server. I don’t know, but come up with some way to get a large population on the test server. Then you can release expansion on the test server first. If after 2 months of ToA being on the test server you realize that 90% of the population says it sucks, then you eat the money and don’t release it (or fix it). That is better than releasing it and driving everyone away from the game.
Bots-
I don’t think they should be banned. Maybe as a rule make it so that you can’t get buffs from somebody unless they are in your group. Also, put a range on them. This means that no lowly toon in PvE will get to powerlevel with a buffbot because if they group the lowerlevel won’t get XP because the mobs are gray to the buffbot. And in RvR this means two things: that the stealther (or whatever class) does not get all the realm points because he is grouped with a bot, and because there the bot has to be within range it is exposed to danger and getting killed also.
Advertise –
Why is it that I’ve seen Mr. T advertising for Warcraft, but I’ve never seen a commercial for Mythic’s products? Also, they need to be creative. Find ways to make it go viral on the Internet. Maybe tell subscribers that for each person they get to subscribe to the game, once that person pays for 3 months you get a month free. That means if I get 10 friends to play the game, and they all subscribe for 3 months or more, I get 10 months free. You just ask new people who subscribe “who referred you?”
