I recently reactivated my main and bot for the 14 day trial after having been inactive since end 2005 except for one other short trial reactivation. I decided to post this here because I thought maybe seeing the game from an outsider's point of view might be interesting.


Transfer mechanics

The transfer documentation on the herald is adequate, but it's aimed mostly at current players. It was pretty disconcerting to log on to an archived server and be the only one there though hehe.

I never received an email about the transfer process like the doco says. I have received DAoC emails there since so I know the address is correct. If those mails are no longer sent it might be best to remove that from the documentation.

I had my old DAoC install directories but it took some fiddling to work out how to transfer my char settings over. I don't know how easy it would have been for me to remember how to play without my quickbars.


In-game

There have been a lot of quests added. It's good to keep the PvE content moving since that is the draw for one facet of the community. It would be nice to know which ones are important and which are fluff though.

Interesting keep/tower/bridge reworks. I presume the bridge ramps are to stop the horrendous camps that used to get set up on them? I never saw a single (non-mounted) treb throughout my time back, have they been removed, or just nerfed into uselessness?

Maybe a "welcome back" NPC in the capitals could be of some use. They could ramble on about changes and point people in the direction of important quests such as horses, champ levels, etc. Just a thought.

there are still a lot of bugs around. I got stuck in scenery at least three times (in keeps) and when being auto-ported on login from a contested area to one of the relic villages my bot ended up in a horse model at least twice.

The lag wasn't as bad for me as people on VN seemed to have it, but I wasn't in the zerg at any time. I did see some ghosting, and did get graphic stuttering sometimes but I could just as easily blame that on dual logging on my aging dual core with 2GB ram.


Community

Despite the server consolidation (or perhaps because of it?) there still doesn't seem to be much of a community. While on some nights there were hundreds of players in my realm in the frontier, there were few groups willing to pick up randoms. Also, there was rarely a BG, although the (new?) region chat may have made that obsolete anyway.

The advise channel was useful, but is it regional? I was in housing at one stage and got no response to what were probably some reasonable questions.

I think I got in a pug 3 or 4 times and it was good fun. The last group I got though I got the feeling the driver was using radar. Is that crap still happening? Ugh. I also saw people complaining about lag-casting and lag-jumping into keeps, and macro farmers.

I did get some grief about my gear. GoV and Tartaros worked well in my template 5 years ago but apparently they're a bit below spec these days. Still, if I have only two weeks to have a look at the game I'm not gonna do it up to my eyeballs in PvE.

At one stage my bot and I were caught in a keep defence and my main LD'ed and was unable to get back in. You might think a DI3 bot with red buffs could get a group in a keep siege but nope. I was left to use shears and my dot and keep the lord buffed. :/

Overall I don't think the community spirit has gotten worse than 5 years ago but it hasn't improved either. Bitter vets, crossrealming, elitism and complaints about AJing still abound.


I know people bag EA Mythic for spending little time/effort/money on the game but you have to look at it from their point of view too. There are too few players to make spending significant money worthwhile. That's partially the vault of the bitter vets and elitists too, I see far more negative stuff on VN than positive. Whatever happened to the @posts that there used to be. "@soandso, you got me that time, good fight, I had some timers down, will get you next time!". That was what the community was all about. Now the only @'s you see are cheating accusations and general inter-realm bitching. If you want people to come back and make this game big enough for EA to spend money on it, you have to help it along.

In the end, I wasn't convinced to come back and spend money on the game. Maybe some other time though, I'm not ruling it out. I'll always have some very fond memories of DAoC and I'll hold on to my accounts just in case.

Although one could say that the reason so few players are left, is probably because rather then reinvesting into DAoC at it's peak, Mythic spent the money they made on Romans in Space, and especially War Hammer.

A neglected game bores players and eventually they leave for other newer games. On the other hand, everything EA/Mythic tried to improve DAoC generally caused even more people to quit. (Aside from SI maybe.)

It's not an easy position to be in, but if they had gotten away from the strong treadmill based content after at least ToA (where they should have learned that this totally aliented a good portion of the player-base), and instead focus on purely fun & engaging content that doesn't feel like grinding (or the silliness of megga-raids that you spend 3 hours organizing only to wipe in 5m flat or get left with no loot due to bugs & imbalances) it would have gone a long way to retain more players.

Also the whole clustering kludge was a great short-term solution to underpopulated servers, but it was obvious from the start that if you don't fix the fundamental issues with the game, that clustering was only going to lead to a downward spiral. Especially the end-game RvR has been neglected for far too long, leading people to realm-hop to whatever realm has the relics, and the underdog realm dwindles in population. This is a spiral downwards because if the strong realm has no one to hunt, players there quit too.

Most of us agree that this is one of the very best PvP/RvR oriented games there is, but it's sad that Mythic had so little faith in their own product as to neglect it hoping we'd all switch to WAR, which turned out to be hugely inferior to DAoC. (Another indication that there were some issues at EA/Mythic beyond the players control. How you mess up that big with that much cash at stake, is a clear indication of some very bad management decision-making by some higher-ups who obviously didn't understand their own customer base.)

Who here would stick to the old dog DAoC just out of principle, if WAR had turned out to be a sort of DAoC 2 that featured lots of improvements on top of great GFX? They ventured into the wrong IP. I didn't like the GFX of WAR, looked too WoW clone like and I (along with MANY others) screamed that from the very first time I/we saw it in early alpha. I didn't like the PvP/RvR either, it was too canned & inflexible, and didn't feel like a world at war such as NF does. Those are two epic failures that are certainly partly due to the IP they chose to work with, when they would have been far better off just making DAoC 2. (Would have been a much cheaper venture too I'm sure, and would have involved less risk IMO. People love DAoC! They just want a modernized & improved version of it. And yeah, if your target was to beat WoW, then you really don't understand or care about your existing customer base who got you to where you are in the first place! Bit off more then you can chew IMO.)

 

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