Semi4 posted:

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What you say sounds good on the surface but there are problems with your logic.


Yes back in the day players used credit cards to pay for the game and today they can use game cards, but who do you think uses their credit cards to pay for most of the game cards that are used for DAoC? Children?


Today it is easier to identify an adolescent by listening to their voice on vent so many think there are more children in the game today. Back before vent was popular you could not always tell from the text, but there were many children in the game at the beginning. I often ran into children back in the day.


My friend that got me into DAoC had 5 accounts. One for himself and one for each of his kids. One child was 6, one was 8, one was 11 and the oldest was 13. Believe it or not the 6 year old was the best in RvR. The 6 year old was totally devastating and was always wanted in a group. The others were good too but the 6 year old was brilliant at the game.


Also, many who spent their time being totally rude on Mordred, where Mythic allowed such behavior (lets face it, rudeness was a big part of Mordred), are now playing on Ywain (because Mordred is dead) and are only slightly kept in check by the CSRs. So it can seem like the overall number of immature players has risen when it may not have.


If anything, over the last 10 years the DAoC player base has grown older. The players that started playing back when they were 15 years old are now 25. Those who started playing when they were 10 are now 20.


About Realm Pride.

Realm pride existed because it is a natural occurrence in a game like DAoC. When players start a character the natural thing is to assist realm mates. Even immature brats had realm pride back at the beginning.


The natural thing is not:

To become a traitor.

To sit back and do nothing while watching the enemy kill a realm mate who may have joined in to assist and help.

To end IRL friendships because a IRL friend added on and "took” some RPs (yes there was a thread about this very thing where a person posted their anger about a IRL friend that was no longer a friend because they added on to a fight and took some RPs).

Etc. . ..


Realm Pride is a natural occurrence and even the immature showed realm pride back in the day. Realm Pride is not something that only mature players have.


The developers had to incentivize against realm pride to get rid of it. Once players were incentivzed to move away from realm pride, even many mature players moved toward selfish immature behavior. I know many children, who see the world in the somewhat immature black and white viewpoint, that are fed up with the selfish stupidity of adults who have no realm pride and who tell the immature kids to “grow up” to the real world.


To think that the problem of a vanishing realm pride may be the cause of immaturity, that is totally false unless you mean the immaturity of Mythic who created the incentives that moved players away from realm pride.

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valmar_kw posted:

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I do fine, you must be doing it wrong.

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Frendab posted:

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You are forgetting a second shift. Most parents back then did not want to use their credit cards over the internet at all, let alone to pay for a game that required payment each month for their children. There has been a general shift in that area as it has become more normal to shop online and many more MMORPGs have come out, so it would appear your logic is faulty, not mine.

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Frendab posted:

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This really isn't going to be provable one way or another but I saw a huge change from playing WoW when I stopped playing DAoC a while ago. The younger crowd is very noticeable there and it is quite apparent how many of them played back in the day based on their actions and I talked with plenty of people on vent back in the beginning and I never heard a single child playing that wasn't playing with an adult there to supervise them most of the time, although it was rare for a child to even be playing.

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Frendab posted:

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I already answered this above, he also played which made it very different because he was supervising them and if they were rude or said things they shouldn't he would most likely hear about it even if he wasn't always there.

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Frendab posted:

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This is just all kinds of wrong. Realm pride is not a natural occurrence to the extent it was on DAoC. It does not happen in any other game like it did here anymore because the player base has changed on average to be much younger than it was then. It happened because in general the community was more mature and older.

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Frendab posted:

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What incentives to move away from realm pride? If it was so natural as you said it should still be happening up until they made it so you could be on all three realms on ywain, which it wasn't. The immature player base caused the shift just as the mature player base made it enjoyable from the beginning.

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Semi4 posted:

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Again, this lacks logic.

If adults will not use credit cards online, they do not use them for themselves or their kids. Ergo no one in the family plays the game.

If the adults are willing to use the credit card online to get things themselves, then they have no problem using the credit card on the www and they will most certainly use the credit card to get things for their kids. Your position is still illogical.

The MMORPG market was much smaller back then, so the numbers of adults willing to do that wasn't that huge either. Adults being fine with their children using their credit card to pay for their game every month does not follow from them being willing to do it for themselves.



This also lacks logic.

The player base at WoW is not indicative of the typical player at DAOC. It is illogical to take anecdotal evidence of the demographics of WoWs player base and use it as evidence that DAoCs player base has the same demographics.

It is also illogical to have “stopped playing DAoC a while ago” and yet think that you know, via anecdotal evidence, what the player demographic of DAoC is today.

I knew I was going to have to clarify this. I stopped playing DAoC for a number of years and played WoW and then came back to DAoC for about 2 years I believe (and am still playing it now). I also tried out SWG and very briefly Rift, this was more a perception of how the player base of these games has changed since I first saw it shift that way in WoW and when I returned to DAoC saw that it was the same.



Using a straw man to defend an illogical position? I never said my friend supervised his kids. Usually he did not. I said my friend had an account along with his four kids having an account. I never said he supervised them. I said that he had no problem paying for his kids with his credit card.

Sometimes when he was playing his own characters he would run into his kids while they were playing but usually his kids did not even want to be on the same server as he was. That is the way of kids, they do not like their parents hanging out at the playground with them or on vent with them while they are talking to their friends in the game (they feel this is like dad listening in to their phone while they talk to their friends).

Not every child is immature in game, perhaps his weren't they would be the exception more then the rule.



You may not understand the psychology behind it all, but that does not change the psychological makeup of the typical human.

Being a traitor is not the natural occurrence in IRL or in a game. Home pride, pride for your country, pride for your team, pride for your side, that is the natural way of things. It is part of the psychological makeup of the typical human. It is what it is.

And yes it does happen at other games unless the game incentivizes against it of if the game does not have a Realm vs. Realm form of play. If you do not understand it then it is difficult to see, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been happening.

Selfishness and greed are the human condition, that is what psychology speaks to. Humans are not altruistic by nature. This is why immaturity is the problem, once someone has grown up and realized they can't simply act that way it changes how they behave and alters the atmosphere.



The answer to this has been discussed (ad nauseam) on the boards and I mentioned specifics in my post.

RPs/RAs.
I discussed it in the previous post. Did you not see where I discussed an IRL friendship that ended because someone helped a real mate and the realm mate did not consider it help but considered it stealing RPs? (see ArkadyTepes post in this thread about RPs/RAs)

The way that Mythic implemented RPs/RAs it harmed realm pride. As players became more and more concerned with worshiping the almighty RPs they started to look on any player who assisted as leaches rather than a realm mate just helping other realm mates.

To many in the game, and many on the boards, those who leach are horrible people (when in the past before the incentive of RPs/RAs they were considered realm mates that came along and helped).

There have been prideful posts on the boards where players gleefully talked about how they would stop fighting and let leaches die to the enemy. This is the exact opposite of ream pride.

In the past it was, “if it is red, it is dead” and realm mates helped each other. Today it is, “if you steal any of my f’ing RPs I will log in my alt in the other realm and come back and kill your butt and if I can find you IRL I will . . . .”

I can agree with this actually. It shouldn't change the amount of rps because someone in your own realm helped you, there were better ways of implementing this although rps and ras were a good idea of themselves.


Leetisum
Back early on in the game (pre SI and after SI) it was common to show up at a neck check and for a level 47-48 to be invited to a group before they even had a chance to spam LFG. Back then a level 47 could actually contribute to a NF group.

Then Mythic incentivized leetisum and unless a player was level 50 and had the correct TOA gear, they were relegated to zerg or pugs because no one wanted them.

Mythic promoting leetisum contributed to players not caring much about other players in their own realm.

Combine leetisum with the focus on RPs and realm pride no longer means much in the game.

Maybe the rps and ras helped this? I think this moved in from the mindset that happened from another large game with three letters in the title, moreso though.

Realm hopping
Fast leveling is a contributor to a lack of realm pride because fast leveling allows players to have many fully outfitted toons on every realm.

Back in the early days it took 20 to 35 days /played just to level one toon to 50 (that is 9 months to a year of casual play). When it took so long to level a single toon to 50, most players may have tested out all three realms but in the end they picked a realm and stuck with it. Back then most players did not have the time to level toons in more than one realm.

Today it is easy to have full sets of fully outfitted toons in all three realms. Once players have toons leveled in all three realms they no longer have a home realm to have pride in.

Combine RP whores with the attitude about leaches, with leetisum that excludes real mates, with easy realm hopping and the few who have not been dragged over to the dark side of ‘no realm pride’ have little chance in stopping the riotous mob that is pushing realm pride into nonexistence.

I already said this was one so I agree there, but it can't really be avoided now.

/region
This removed the ability for players to police other players, which lead to immature kids (and immature adults) spewing their venom almost unchecked. (see valmar_kw post this thread about /region)

I don't think this one has a huge impact, but it does give a forum for the immaturity to prosper so I do somewhat agree with this one.

There are other things that also harmed realm pride but the above are the most obvious.

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Lightingbird333 posted:

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So stop your pointless debate.

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Frendab posted:

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The problem with that is that when you do what they intended, it lags the server very badly and becomes unplayable because it starts crashing the client with that number of people in one area. Also in terms of the amount of realm points you get, there seems to be much more incentive to fight by yourself then with a group or zerg since you get more per kill alone.

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KeepTake posted:

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Grab a few buds, start on Mordred at lvl 40, get 50, at 50 take a few keeps for scales/glass and start some good fights... No need to worry about ml10 gear there either, though if you can get a good group started you would be the only few with ml10 gear

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Frendab posted:

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Here is the deal with realm pride. It existed because the player base was interested in it being there and there were very few younger children playing at the time. No game cards existed when DAoC first came out, it was all done from credit cards which vastly limited the number of younger immature players.

Also the time played a big factor (leveling, neck check...) because it weeded out the impatient from getting high enough level to RvR (it was cool to be able to RvR before 50 in the frontiers... that was long ago). In general people were mature and helpful and weren't really interested in being the most uber and best which made it much more fun and for a much better atmosphere when people used to actually stop doing other activities in their normal lives to come get on and defend the relic. As the mmorpg genre has gone along, it has moved into grabbing a younger player base and you see the result of that from the atmosphere it creates in the current mmorpg games coming out. It almost doesn't matter what game it is, it is inevitable that the atmosphere is going to end up that way now it is really irreversible. The game has drastically changed and made everything easier and faster, we see the result of catering to the immaturity.

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