Relic system
I believe the relics were necessary realm wide goal to drive large scale RvR. Large scale RvR may not appeal to the elite players that prefer roaming and RP farming, but it was important mechanism to allow casual players to participate in RvR without becoming fodder for the elite players. And I think the vast majority if players are more casual than elite.

Realm Ranks
Important to have. You need to have some sense of progression while PvPing.

Realm abilities
I dislike the realm abilities in DAOC. And I'm not sure there is a way this can be fixed. I think it just creates too much imbalance in PvP that it eventually discourages people from playing the game too late in.

Instead of abilities I'd rather see players rewarded with gear. It's how it's done in most other PvP games now and I think it seems to work better. It's much easier to keep balanced, easy to add new tiers later.

Titles and lifetime stat tracking
Titles yes. Stat tracking... Hmm, I think it mostly encourages ugly behavior. Maybe some. But not too much (DAOC is too much).

*sigh*

They lost population to WOW not becuse of ToA, the carebares went to WoW instead of playing DAoC becuse WoW had better PvE.

DAOC never dominated. It was on the same level as Asheron's Call and Ultima Online. It was EverQuest that was dominating. And I completely believe TOA was DAOC's attempt to become more like EQ (and failed).

Lol, why would happy players flock to WOW? Toa drove them away, lol!

Realm abilities can work, they just need to work like how they do in global agenda. well, GA doesn't have RAs but how their skills work. Very minimal effects but do add to a player's advantage,


I would actually rather not see Gear being the reward. The reason is time and time again companies have proven that balancing gear is impossible. I have yet to see a single game that has balanced gear in PvP, rift being maybe the only exemption. WAR was atrocious, GA has some gear issues for sure, Aion, WoW...the only game close is rift I guess although i don't know enough about their system so maybe I am wrong.


There are 2 types of PvP'ers. Griefers and Challengers. Challengers make up the majority of PvP'ers I'd say. They don't care about winning all the time, they just want to be on equal grounds and have a chance of winning. They play PvP games for the challenge and skill.


Grifers want OP gear and to roflstomp everything. If they can't then the game is broken. "I put in 200 hours, i should rofl stomp everything!!!!" Sadly this is the mentality gaming companies prefer to cater too, and was really brought upon via WoW imo. Until the industry gets their heads out of their butts and realizes the painfully obvious then nothing will change and gear will continue to be one of the driving forces behind the destruction of the PvP based MMO genre.

 

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Why would you stop eating at a hamburger joint when a steakhouse open across the street? Both sell meat and you did not complain about the hamburgers before.

Better stuff = most ppl will actually get that rather than the old and not as good stuff.

EDIT: But where did all the "pvp/RvR centric players" go? Did they all drop down dead from the ToA experience or did they shift game to something with better PvP/RvR? if so, what game(s)? I want to know as aparantly many PvP lovers stoped playing DAoC at the same time as WoW came out.

if OP is talking about prime than mr cydoc let me inform you that in their FAQ or something they said that player crafted gear would be the best in the game. that mob dropped is as good as npc merchant gear.

and when you die you lose gems but i forgot what the gems are for


prob the infinity gauntlet.

 

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Relic - Gives players a goal and a reason to work together,but should not give to much of an advantage where people are gonna find a way to just shift to the winning side.

Realm ranks and realm abilities are fine,gives players a goal,but to much power leads to too many problems,balance here is important,mabye give them sum advantages over other players,but if very high realm ranks should be given more grp advantages and alot of pve advantages.

Player titles can be very usefull and a lil pride is ok. I would suggest "lenth of time playing" titles only,new titles every month for 1st six months,then a new title every six months there after. This way a newbie can see a title and choose to play with another newbie or if experianced help is needed for sum reason,the player doesn't waste hours looking for the correct help and could easly get discourged...

Realm is of most importance,one realm per account!!

My other 2 cents would be,
Crafted gear should always be important and needed and
Any kind of self timers/self buffs should be a minimum of an hour,any thing less makes the game NOT FUN...

 

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I could imagine DAOC being a fun and long lasting game without relics. But I do think they are important to create incentives for players to engage in larger scale conflicts and to care about defending the towers and keeps in their own realm. You can see what RvR is like without relics by looking at WAR where the devs have had to come up all sorts of bonuses to try to incentivize players to defend their own keeps. Preventing the enemy from taking your relics and thereby gaining damage bonuses is a far better incentive than defense rps.


Realm ranks are vitally important. A decade ago before everybody had 2+ RR 11 toons on their accounts, I can remember what a great sense of accomplishment there was to reach a new realm rank especially if you were the first on the server (my cleric was the first RR 10 on Gawaine). Unless you play a ton of hours and/or with a set group that farm rps by the hundreds of thousands a day, it still takes a considerable effort to attain RR 6 and higher. I've made many new level 50s the last 5 years and not one has reached even RR 7. Attaining the next realm rank provides a powerful incentive to RvR for hours every day even when the action may be slow or you are getting zerged a lot.


Similarly realm abilities give you a strong reason to keep accumulating realm points on a given toon. The higher realm rank you go, the more abilities you can buy and the more powerful your character becomes. Without realm ranks and abilities, RvR would just be a large scale version of Capture the Flag where what you did one day would have no effect on your character the next time you logged in.


Titles are a fun bit of fluff, but I almost think stat tracking hurt the game. Once they added the ability to track your "I remain standing" score, players frequently started engaging in cowardly tactics (wilsoning, suiciding on pve mobs, etc.) to avoid dying to enemy players and lowering their IRS.

 

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