Just figured I would give my 2 cents. I am a new player basically (played for first 2 months of DAOC release and quit around 30ish) Been playing Live for a few weeks now and am recent 50.

It really seems worse than it is from a new players perspective. Yea it sucks starting at 1, but it literally took me like 4 days to hit level 30. From 30 I started looking for the best places to get both xp and money and am doing pretty well.

As far as templating goes it does not seem so bad. I really was just like wtf is templating for a while until I realized that I had maxed a few of my stats in game. Then I saw that the best method was to try to max as many stats as you can and began looking for different gear to fill the gaps. I am sure my template could be better but hey, its working for me so far.

Considering it took all of 2 weeks to hit level 50 not playing a ton I do not feel the extra game at the end is a bad thing. Now I am looking forward to try and do the tougher dungeons to get better gear and see if I can swap my gear around to maximize it use.

One of the things that I would like most is some way to know where I should be going next. Some type of guide that is like. "Once level 30 you can do task dungeons or do these listed repeatable quest (list here) or do these dungeons for some xp/gear. Once level 50 you will want to start camping these areas for glass/scales or want to go to this dungeon for better gear drops and eventually move on to this dungeon"

Most of those games are going F2P in a desperate attempt to cover their operating costs because people are not subscribing to them. Its not a sign of success, its a sign of disinterest or failure

If this game went F2P it would get a horde of new players, briefly, then they would discover all the barriers to entry mentioned by the OP and go play some other F2P instead.

This game started off with a great design and great promise, then they let the original design team go and replaced it with a new team and it started to go downhill. Every expansion added some neat stuff but made the game harder to participate in and increased the barrier to entry (amount of work required to be able to participate successfully).

I am recently returned to the game. I am engaged in trying to template a character to farm with, so that I can start working on templating all of my other 50's. Once I have a few characters I enjoy playing, I can then try to get them sufficient RPs to be able to compete - that will be the hardest part, although perhaps not as time consuming. I have a good guild of moderate size and they have been very helpful so far. Still, I expect to spend probably a year or so working just on templates/CLs/MLs for my various characters and even then I won't get all of them (The prices on items that are considered useful enough to be included in most templates are completely out of this world. If I totalled up all the gold on all my characters I might make 2p total at the moment. Templating my hunter is going to cost me at least another 20-25p that I haven't earned yet).

Luckily I enjoy the PvE, and (coming from playing Starwars Galaxies) don't mind grinding.

What Mythic needs to do is add some basically templated outfits for each class that players can then augment with artifacts and select items. They don't need to be great outfits, but just enough to be able to participate quickly. They should come from NPCs and be available for a reasonable price (say 3p for a full set of armor, belt, cloak, jewel, bracers, rings etc, not to include weapons/shield/staff). Players can then get involved in RvR (or the rest of the game) and begin farming for better equipment but have much less work/playtime required to get up to scratch. The Epic stuff should fulfill this role but isn't enough, and of course doing the Epic quest is very time consuming and better suited to the gameplay when leveling was much slower. Now that you can be 50 in a few days having to go back and do the epic quest over a few weeks is just a time waster. I think most new players will find this frustrating, and since we have lost all of the PvE folks, it will mostly be done solo by any new player.

 

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The low pop will probably discourage a lot of new players

This would be covered by your Epic Armour, plus Champion Weapon.

Or Slayer Armour plus Slayer Weapon.

Or some combination of the two.

Going much further will just put the remaining crafters out of business, which, speaking from the point of view of a crafter, is probably a bad idea.

 

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Most ideas here want to make DAoC easy mode or PVE game but there are already much better PVE games and easy mode DAoC is called Warhammer. Everybody knows it was very sucesfull too, right?

DAoC was good as it was before it became too much demanding in PVE.

Most of the ideas here are steering people away from PvE, actually.

 

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I came back two months ago after a four year break. Had never played TOA, couldn't remember much of the last few expansions, knew nothing of the revamped loot tables in the classic dungeons. Only took me a week or two to figure out what to farm on Hib... Carved Sphene Rings and Carved Red Spinel Rings. 10 plat each on the CM, takes an hour to farm each.

Making plat is just soooooo hard for a new player.

 

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take WL's and necro's out of the game you got a even matched 3 realms the reason this game is dieing is the shear mid and alb zerg and they play those realms because they dont wanna walk around the corner of every corner and have to fight those 2 OPed ass classes it is next to impossible to solo on a caster these days because of these 2 classes and people do not enjoy playing tanks (some) there for they grp and 1 realm see's a grp another grp turns up and so on and so forth untill u got 3 FGs of mids 5 FGs of albs trying to fight 1 FG of hibs that dont rele have that i win class like those 2 realms so no1 plays the realm anymore what im trying to say is any new person that comes to this game will just see zerg vs zerg and if they choose hib as there first realm they will leave game if they choose mid as there first realm they will leave as the ruin all action and same with albs sorry for the rant its over now GL

 

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if you kept reading you would have seen that my post for the most part what illustrating that yes there are people that will give you the mind set that there are cool kids and baddies that arent worth playing with.

or the vice versa that there are good people left in this game in it to have fun, just that sadly the most vocal are usually in the first group.


unless the attitude of the playerbase opens up to the idea that there can be new players comming in, (i mean most of the initial reaction to the devs post was there arent any new players or wont be that kind of thing) it wont matter if new ones do because they will just be told how they HAVE to play instead of the many ways they CAN play~


also english isnt my first language so sometimes shit gets lost in translation in my head!

 

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At launch through SI, the game wasn't that complicated, and it was much easier to balance. After adding all the OP expansion classes, a barrages of new trinkets with different stats (TOA and CL) plus many new class skills, they've overcomplicated the game. It's now impossible to balance and overwhelming to start up.