There's so much talk going on about the lack of realm pride and realm hopping. How easy it's become to log in to the game and find out that Albion has the relics, or Midgard is raging a campaign making the frontiers blue. Simply log out, grab a drink and log back in to the realm that has the upper hand at the moment.

It wasn't always that easy. Once upon a time, if you had Hibs on Kay, you had to have Hibs on Iseult and Lancelot. If you wanted to play Albion or Midgard, it had to be on a different cluster. When it changed, they had realm timers. You had to wait a length of time before switching out to an opposing realm. Now, the timers have been downgraded so it takes you longer to walk in to your kitchen to pour a drink than it does to switch realms. Cross realming, realm hopping and even realm point power leveling have become common place.

So what do you think, is there a viable way to bring back realm pride, and how would it improve the game?

Topic of the Week would love to hear your thoughts on realm pride!

Hey, I'm looking for some topic ideas. If you have any you'd like to see posted, please drop me a line!


Posted from Camelot Vault

I think the solution would be simple.

Increase the realm timer to 24hours. Now that were clustered people enjoy the different classes.. so we cant take that away from the "paying customer", however, it would deture people from hopping to be on the so called banwagon of relic sauce.

People will be more proned to playing the realm they like the most and dedicating more time to it. People who want to cry about it because they cant milk the system are free to go. They wont hurt the player base, if anything I see some old school'ers coming back for realm pride.

.02

 

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Make realm timer only for rvr zones. If I want to PVE on another realm I want to be able to do that. Nice to check your houses on other realms.

I play Albion 99% of the time but also have alts on hib/mid but I almost never RVR there. Sometimes I level a character on another realm just to do something else.
A realm timer if I only PVE want to PVE would be ridiculous.

Nothing, realm pride was incredibly overrated and died long before clustering with ToA bringing out people's capitalistic side. A realm timer solve that at all.

 

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I disagree. Clustering provided people with the option of playing different realms on 1 server/cluster on 1 account. This was an option they previously did not have. It required multiple accounts and more money invested in the game.

Even casual players that don't want more than 1 account have alts on other realms now. They would be forced to play 1 realm if they wanted to maintain 1 account pre-clustering. Clustering had a large effect on the game populations and relic hoppers. I don't want to say realm pride, because realm pride is something unrelated to populations. Plenty of people were looking out for themselves or their group or guild and not the realm before clustering.

A realm timer would really determine an underdog realm regardless of relic status. I remember Lancelot in the early days. Huge Alb zergs and Hib zergs. Very few Mids, but the Mids were very effective.

 

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Except People weren't really realm switching until the realm timer first became five minutes, which happened well after there were only four ToA clusters (third round of clustering). Prior to that, it was an hour, and eight hours before it was an hour. People weren't circumventing the realm timer by ending the task (which wouldn't work as well with long timers anyway, as logging into the game and zoning starts the timer). Realm switching wasn't as prevalent back then anyway because the game wasn't as old and maintaining characters across realms was more difficult. You couldn't transfer plat as easily, PL services weren't as common, and gearing still took a while before MLs were made easier multiple times (in both difficulty and convenience of porters), having to run artifact encounters, buying/farming scrolls without the BP merchants in game, etc.

 

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Umm, realm pride died because the population dwindled from others games release and Mythic clustering up servers. It was never overrated and it was alot of fun. A 24 hour timer i would be satisfied with if thats all that could be done.

 

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I know how to bring back everything, to make DAOC whole again.

But not for free ...............

End of Line.

 

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Realm pride is hard to re-create. You can fake it a bit with longer realm timers, which I favor. I like the suggestion of limiting the timer to RvR zones, but I'm not sure how realistic that is. Maybe logging into another realm before the timer is up ports you to the housing entrance and you're stuck in housing until the timer is up. This would at least let players check on rent or work on templates before the timer expires.

Speaking of timer, I think even an hour is a good start. 5 minutes is too short, even if it couldn't be bypassed. It doesn't need to be ridiculously long, but long enough to help limit the hopping.

The other half of the equation is addressing why people realm hop. Part of it is hopping for relic bonuses or for guaranteed RvR action, and not much can be done to disuade that besides the timer. The other part is that people just get bored and want something different. For that, I feel like it probably has a lot to do with playing in the same RvR zones for so many years.

Give us OF back so we have a change of scenery. (Ideally, do a bit of world changing so that the frontiers connect, but not over an Agramon kind of zone. I haven't looked at the maps enough to see if it would line up, but my inspiration would be to connect the realms at the locations of the portal keeps. For example, MPK in Emain would connect to the location of HPK in Odins through a little valley. Even if this wasn't done and we had to port, I wouldn't care. OF was fun, and it would be neat to go back and have that change of pace.

In addition, make the frontiers more dynamic than once in a while adding a few quest points like the Halloween patches. What if once in a while masses of guards left each realm to meet in combat in some zone. Maybe the dragons leave the epic zones and fly around the frontiers, causing havoc and killing many in their paths. I realize that things like this would require quite a bit of coding, but an occasional change to make things more interesting might help. We already get PvE events once in a while, and this would be along those lines.

I don't think we'll see much of the realm pride that we had back in the old days. Back then, a few Mids griefing Hibs outside of DL was cause for the battle cry to go out in TNN, which was the hub of communication outside of your guilds and alliances. We all raced out to meet the foes in combat, and proceeded to get splattered across the Gorge since they were all purple to us. We were united in the fight against Stungard, Albion (Mythic's darling realm), and our unitemized, low-content PvE areas. That feeling is alive in a few people, but I don't see it becoming standard again unless there's a population surge warranting a break-up of the cluster. Since that can't be relied on, options like the realm timer and other things to keep things interesting are our best bets. That, and showing a bit of respect for your fellow realm-mates so that people actually *want* to play with you in your realm of choice.

 

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