Hello everyone and welcome back to another edition of the Wayback Wednesday recap. By the time you are reading this article I should be about 36,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean heading towards Hawaii. Wish me luck, and on that note let's talk about last week.
This episode was the sixth time we visited the Dark Age of Camelot on Wayback Wednesday. Our adventure this week focused on RvR in the Molvik battleground. This week, and for the next two episodes, I represented the forces of Midgard. Joining me on this foray was three members of the Mythic team. Kai Schober the Senior Community Manager, Talal Saad a designer on DAoC, and Carrie Gouskos who is a producer for Mythic.
The first thing we announced on the stream is that Infernal sleeve merchants have returned to DAoC. But not everyone is happy about this. The majority of the players are glad that the merchants have returned but they are less than pleased with the prices. Talal recognizes that they have a lot of frustrated players but they intend to, "make accessible items, weapons, equipment in general, to our playing public without marginalizing either PvE or the player market." (5:30 into the first video) Mythic based their price points for these vendor items on current market value. However, they are slowly lowering the prices to make the items more accessible. This does not mean that everyone will be able to purchase these items. Mythic still wants these items to mean something and will not end up giving them away. Also, do not worry about waking up one day and the merchants have left DAoC. Talal assured us that there would be plenty of warning before the time was running out on this blue light special.
Another topic that we talked about during this episode was the possibility of DAoC one day going free to play. While there is currently no announcement of DAoC dropping the subscription we can see in the industry that there is an obvious trend of MMOs transitioning to the F2P or the Freemium business model. Having played DAoC I have a hard time seeing what is currently part of the game that they could monetizing that wouldn't risk alienating the core player base. How do you feel about the possibility of DAoC going F2P and what do you think they should charge for?
While those were two of hot topics we discussed on the stream we also talked about many other things. At 1:18:00 into the 1st video we talked about a progression server starting at day 1, similar to the origin server idea, and the possible good and bad impacts it could have on the game. Do you like the mystery boxes lying around DAoC? Don' worry. They most likely are not going anywhere anytime soon. If you want to hear about the funnies things that the Mythic team members have seen in DAoC jump to the 12:30 minute mark of the second video for the answers. You can also hear Talal talk about the synergy and what he believes makes 8v8 combat so special at the start of part two of the stream.
I would like to take this opportunity to spotlight two members of the DAoC community. First, to Hydrolic. Good job herding cats in Molvik last week and leading our battle group. I appreciate your efforts. Second to Tom Spillar (AKA Etaew). Tom is attempting to recreate some of the functionality of the old herald. You can upload logs of your RvR session to Tom's page and receive a breakout of the kill stats. You can see the Wayback Wednesday play session here.
Since I will be in Hawaii today there will be no Wayback Wednesday tonight. I will return on the 26th and will play a game developer-free. I'm not sure which game yet so please leave your suggestions in the comments below, I just might pick it. The next time we play DAoC will be on October 10th. This also happens to be DAoC's 11th birthday. Join me in wishing them a happy birthday as we adventure our way through Cathal Valley. Make sure to start working on your Master Levels now.
In other Wayback Wednesday news I would like to wish a fond farewell to Fia Tjernberg of Funcom. Fia has stepped down as game director for Anarchy Online. You can read her post on the AO forums for all the reasons behind Fia's Farewell. I had the opportunity to spend time with Fia covering AO and I can say she truly loved that game and believed in what she was doing. She will be missed. Thanks for tuning in and I hope to see you all when I return. Please leave all question and comments in the space below. You can also find me on Twitter or friend me on Facebook. As always, thanks for watching!
