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http://www.frogdice.com/muckbeast/arrogance/is-blizzard%E2%80%99s-cataclysm-the-worst-expansion-in-mmo-history.html posted:

With all of that out of the way, do I agree with his final conclusion? Do I think Cataclysm is the worst MMO expansion in history?


No, I do not. I believe that title still goes to Dark Age of Camelot: Trials of Atlantis (DAoC: ToA), and I don’t even think its a fair fight.


DAoC: ToA was released October 28, 2003, a year before WoW in a time where Everquest was the WoW of the MMO industry. It wasn’t the quality of the content that made Atlantis such an utter failure. It was the fact that DAoC used an entire expansion, all that budget and manpower, to create an expansion that essentially tryed to EQ-ify (in the same way games now try to WoW-ify themselves) the game.


ToA introduced massive raids – some of them requiring 12 hours of straight gameplay with groups 50-100 large. It introduced massively powerful artifacts that completely dominated the PvP (RvR) landscape. Within a few months, if you did not have a full complement of fully leveled up artifacts you simply couldn’t compete in RvR.


This was an absolutely titanic shift in the game. Before ToA, you could cap all your stats, resistances, etc. with crafted gear. It might be expensive, but it didn’t require any raiding or specific boss farming. People lovede this because it made PvP a level playing field where skill, team composition, etc. were everything.


ToA utterly ruined and destroyed this, and the shockwave was fast and brutal. Within a few months, this expansion caused DAoC to lose approximately two thirds of its userbase, and it never recovered. Even Mythic staff (including Mark Jacobs, the founder) eventually admitted ToA was a gigantic mistake.


Can you imagine investing millions of dollars and zillions of man hours into an expansion – all with the goal of GROWING your game – and the net effect is to lose TWO THIRDS of your customers? Spending the ToA money on guns and booze would have been more productive. In order to stop the exodus of players, they had to release non-ToA enabled servers. That’s right folks: ToA was so bad, people preferred servers WITHOUT it. The non-ToA servers were the most popular, and probably saved DAoC from completely shutting down.


For that reason, I believe Trials of Atlantis is still far and away the worst MMO expansion ever made, and I think it is unlikely it will ever be dethroned.

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http://www.frogdice.com/muckbeast/arrogance/is-blizzard%E2%80%99s-cataclysm-the-worst-expansion-in-mmo-history.html posted:
With all of that out of the way, do I agree with his final conclusion? Do I think Cataclysm is the worst MMO expansion in history?

No, I do not. I believe that title still goes to Dark Age of Camelot: Trials of Atlantis (DAoC: ToA), and I don’t even think its a fair fight.

DAoC: ToA was released October 28, 2003, a year before WoW in a time where Everquest was the WoW of the MMO industry It wasn’t the quality of the content that made Atlantis such an utter failure. It was the fact that DAoC used an entire expansion, all that budget and manpower, to create an expansion that essentially tryed to EQ-ify (in the same way games now try to WoW-ify themselves) the game.

ToA introduced massive raids – some of them requiring 12 hours of straight gameplay with groups 50-100 large. It introduced massively powerful artifacts that completely dominated the PvP (RvR) landscape. Within a few months, if you did not have a full complement of fully leveled up artifacts you simply couldn’t compete in RvR.

This was an absolutely titanic shift in the game. Before ToA, you could cap all your stats, resistances, etc. with crafted gear. It might be expensive, but it didn’t require any raiding or specific boss farming. People lovede this because it made PvP a level playing field where skill, team composition, etc. were everything.

ToA utterly ruined and destroyed this, and the shockwave was fast and brutal. Within a few months, this expansion caused DAoC to lose approximately two thirds of its userbase, and it never recovered. Even Mythic staff (including Mark Jacobs, the founder) eventually admitted ToA was a gigantic mistake.

Can you imagine investing millions of dollars and zillions of man hours into an expansion – all with the goal of GROWING your game – and the net effect is to lose TWO THIRDS of your customers? Spending the ToA money on guns and booze would have been more productive. In order to stop the exodus of players, they had to release non-ToA enabled servers. That’s right folks: ToA was so bad, people preferred servers WITHOUT it. The non-ToA servers were the most popular, and probably saved DAoC from completely shutting down.

For that reason, I believe Trials of Atlantis is still far and away the worst MMO expansion ever made, and I think it is unlikely it will ever be dethroned.

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Morgash posted:

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The main points of the quoted article, have been made by me (accused ToA fanboy) more than once, in this very thread. And nice job exaggerating the 2/3rds loss of players without mentioning the release of WoW. Was ToA a failure? Yep.
Don't think anyone in this thread is arguing it wasn't.

The question, at least from my perspective, is why? Why was it a failure? The content was quality - even the raids, although I disagree with the lengthy requirements they originally entailed - it was the lack of a "level playing field," as I've stated many times.

Nice to see there is published work out there that agrees with me.

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Kahzee posted:

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Bitching about the past isn't going to change the future....the point is now toa isn't a problem at all people kept saying its hard for new players to rvr blah blah and now look at everything....u don't even have to step foot out of hall of heroes to get artis and shiz rendering whole zones worthless...but the cry babies are happy because everything is dumbed down...yet people STILL cry that its to hard to level get geared and everything

I mean I got level 35 on a ment within a few days just from the bg quests leveling has never been easier

And gear...u don't need a legit temp to zerg and u get tons of bps/scales from keeps just join one and run noone cares what u wear

And there's ml10s going on constantly
The point is people are always going to cry unless they start a new char and its 50 cl10 ml10 fully geared speced and givin 200p so they don't have to do anything

THATS what is killing daoc

The cry babies

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