IMO there is only 1 major problem with this game:
It is the accessibility of RvR.
If you have a full-time guild group that 8v8's every day at the same time with the same setup, then this game is great.
If you like to zerg and someone happens to be running a zerg, and you happen to be able to fit into one of the groups, then this game is ok.
Otherwise, it is extremely hit and miss. You can try to form a PuG but it is time consuming and will absolutely fail the vast majority of the time. You can go out and solo which can be fun but I get extremely sick of boating to another realms land to get run over continuously by full groups, small man's, or stealthers who add onto solo fights. Or you can small man in which case you still get run over by full groups, but you make most of your RPs by screwing people over who try to solo.
This game is extremely fun to me in a very wide variety of RvR scenario's. But they are just too hard to come by and its sad that the vast of the times I log into the game I end up wasting 3 hours doing absolutely nothing fun, get frustrated/bored and log.
Some of you won't care because you always have your 8man guild group, but if we are concerned with DAOC being a successful game to attract new and returning players, then the issue that I bring up is of importance.
But what's the answer to this? I really don't know. I certainly am not suggesting scenario RvR I think this would ruin the game, even though it solves the problems of being run over constantly by unequal numbers, and/or going out to look for a fight and finding nothing.
I've been thinking that there is an inherent flaw, but it is surely too big to fix. The idea is that it has to do with the layout of the frontiers, and the fact that the RvR zone is made separate from all other aspects of the game. This could be summarized in 2 main problems:
1. You are almost always wide in the open to be seen from far away, so you really have no protection unless you have bigger numbers than the enemies and/or speed6. You can hide behind a tree in the middle of nowhere in order to get some protection, but why would you expect that in a million years an enemy is going to run by you so you can fight him?
2. Keeps and Towers are the only thing to break the openness and give you protection, but this offers too much protection and you're not going to find RvR inside of a keep unless the enemy decides to break it down.
Maybe it's not clear what I'm getting to, but rather than having protection inside a keep/tower, protection should be in the form of being able to get to important RvR centerpoints without being so easily exposed to all your enemies, yet not being somewhere like that tree (in the middle of nowhere) where you could sit there for days on end and not see an enemy, cuz its in the middle of nowhere.
In other words, instead of NF being a big open expanse of flat ground with a few hills, trees, and rivers, i think RvR could be more interesting if it was a complicated forest on the side of a mountain with bridges and towns, and maybe even underground tunnels, and rivers, so you could get from A to B without being seen by everything in between, yet once you leave the safety of your border keep you are at the hands of the enemies which might be lying just around the corner, but you wouldn't know that, because you don't have 5000 units of unrestricted line of sight in all directions.
In some ways Mordred did this since RvR could take place in a very wide variety of landscapes, sometimes with interesting geometries. But obviously with teleporter hubs, Mordred RvR became not much more than camping cotswold/gothwaite and repeatedly killing people that were worth no RPs.
Well I don't know where I'm going with this. But I think a redesign of NF (not just geometry, but with RvR incentives too) could solve a lot of these issues, and make quality RvR more accessible without resorting to crappy WoW-type scenario bullcrap. It should be so that once you leave your borderkeep, its either you're going to die, or the enemy is going to die. And there should somehow be incentives to go to certain area's without enemies being able to camp the chokepoints that will get you there. And its also quite a problem you either run around your homeland making no RPs because there are 10x more friendly players than realm enemies, or waste 5 minutes boating to an enemies homeland where you make no RPs because for every 1 of you, there are 10 enemies camping in the safety of their bridge/keep waiting for you to get off the boat so they can slaughter you. IMO, NF should be designed so that each realms "homeland" is far smaller, like half the size or less, and the majority of NF is made up by the place in between (ie. a really big Agramon, without milegate chokepoints)
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