I loved the difficulty of of the original ToA. I hated I was forced to suffer through such a thing. Forced being the key word. I enjoyed doing the MLs every now and then. Doing an encounter here and there. I didn't enjoy spending my entire weekend to finish 1 ML, not get any encounters done because they weren't up, having to then PvE more to actually finish off my MLXP and then going out into RvR and being punished for not being ML5+ and no artis.


The issue wasn't the content persay, it was that it destroyed RvR

 

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TOA would have been fine had it just been PvE only stuff. It had some real cool areas and encounters. And, I am glad to have done it once (well except for all the bugs early-ML3 almost drove me to murder). It is easy now, but I still don't like all the crap it added to RvR. I miss the simpler game of pre-toa. Likely one of the main reasons I enjoy the BGs more than NF now.

Of course we are just kicking a dead horse.

 

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Ironically if you look at the available statistics regarding daocs population at the time it was still growing when toa released and a while after. When NF came the population took a noticeable hit. People did not like NF.

Problem is WoW released at the time of NF so hard to say with great certainy the actual causaility here, unless you where apart of the community back then and remember the sh..t storm that followed NF release.

Personally I didn't care much for ToA, it was a necessary evil to compete but NF pissed me off, and each and every time I have said "thats it I'm taking a time off" it has been due to the design of NF and the playstyle that it basically enforces people into. ( wich is vulturing off structural points, coastgaurding, completly removing the reward for actually traveling around and removing the middle ground between high end competative 8v8 and casual actual RvR )

DAoC+OF+Cryengine3+current patches+15 million dollars in marketing = profit.

/edit

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OHGjSm_RMo

Relativly easy to use, runs on a crappy xbox ( hello new market to tap ) and if you picure the daoc scenary it is not as heavy on vege and stuff so would probably run pritty well on even 2 year old computors when maxed. Also remb cryengine scales extremly well when going frow low to highest, so crap comp will run it on a single core with a 8 series low end card albeit crappy but what can you except ..

 

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TOA was a massive expansion -- loads and loads of high level content, equipment, and abilities to explore.

I think the endgame today would be a lot more dull without the features it brought, and PvE would have been a *LOT* more dull without it. In terms of adding choices and adding new things to do, it was a great success. Remember that at the end of SI, you could build a "perfect" suit for most any character, hitting all the caps -- TOA made templating non-trivial again. Also, as a fan of small group PvP, the new arsenal of tricks that came from different choices of TOA gear & abilities made things much more interesting.

It was not universally loved, but you cannot please everyone. It was DAOC's "growing up" moment. Look back at how simple SI was by comparison -- the great amount of gameplay added in TOA kept me playing for several more years, both on the PvE and PvP sides.

 

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yeah i don't think there was anything really that *wrong* with TOA from a game design POV, it was just too big of a change to the game too quickly. In retrospect I think they simply mismanaged it. It would have been better received if they'd just released it in 2 or 3 stages, eg: oceanus + stygia + MLs 1-5 + half the artis, then 9 months later MLs 6-10, volcanus + aerus, rest of the artis. Or broken it down even further in 4x6 month expansions. TOA in one big expansion was just too much, there were too many bugs and it created too big of a disparity between the hardcore who made it to the end and the casuals struggling to get ml1.

I think WOW had by far the greatest single impact on DAOC's decline in 2004-5, far greater than TOA or NF. WOW simply made DAOC look and feel old, especially the UI/controls, though overall though I'd say buffbots lost the most subs over the full lifetime of the game, and were probably the biggest single design flaw DAOC had (and still has).

I'd still be willing to bet my own hard-earned cash that a DAOC2 with almost copy/pasted classes and mechanics plus totally rewritten UI/controls, only mildly touched-up assets, and minimal actually new content would perform very well. The only real game design change I would make is to push DAOC2 more towards the sandbox end of the MMO spectrum, namely to evolve the zone system to be more like EVE online's high/low/no security space, and to deepen the economic side of the game. This includes not segregating PVP and PVE into distinct and entirely separate zones, but with additional mechanics (eg: guards/outposts) that limit the extent to which PVEers can be ganked. Remember, even WOW makes all zones over level 10 PVP zones. In DAOC's world this might translate into keep and tower ownership creating opportunities for the owning realm to access some PVE dungeon/encounter with some level of NPC protection, the level of protection being determined by whether the keep is closer to contested zones (ie: less protection) or home zones (more protection). The key design element here is creating a system of risk v reward.

In short, DAOC2 need only be a graphical and UI/control system upgrade to existing DAOC, with a greater emphasis on sandbox-oritented gameplay & content, supported with some level of minimal marketing. It's pretty much a given the level of grassroots/viral marketing for DAOC2 would be pretty strong.

 

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I agree

 

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There were far better ways to provide variety and template challenges (LOL) than by wrecking balance beyond recognition with toa.

The funny thing is that everyone I played with didn't mind ToA at all. In fact we spent the majority of our time, outside of RvR, in ToA and enjoyed the game immensely. In fact I have never talked to anyone inside the actual game that really hated ToA. Lots of people were sick of going on bugged raids and all that stuff but liked the content. The only people I have ever talked to that actually hate ToA for what it introduced to the game are on the VNboards and most of those people quit right after it came out, and even before in many cases, and never really experienced it once some of the bugs were worked out and it became basically functional, never mind all of the nerfs and patches to balance out the content that happened over the years.

Most people that cry about ToA are just repeating the same crap that has been on these boards for years and most of them have no idea what they are even talking about. Case in point... How many threads have people vehemently blaming the loss of the game's population directly on ToA? How many have said for years that the game's population disappeared directly after ToA was released? This has been shown to be absolutely wrong and incontrovertibly contradicted by the numbers yet people still cling to this idea.

Honestly I know more people that quit the game because of SI than anything else. Animists and bonedancers in their pre-nerf fashion drove away more people that I knew personally in the game than anything else except maybe warlocks and bainshees. I have never played with a single person in the game that quit because of ToA.

 

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^ Well I couldn't disagree more. I saw far less whining on VN about it then inside the game from fellow guildies so frustrated that they kept falling over like toy soldiers. Each week and month the casualties mounted as people simply couldn't believe that Mythic was not fixing, nerfing, and adjusting things that made it impossible to enjoy either PvE (bugs) or PvP (OPd stuff).

I agree that ToA had a lot of potential as a great PvE content addition, but it was so bugged and so imbalanced that you have to be either insane or having a memory lapse to remember it as anything less then a fiasco for both DAoC and Mythic as a whole.


Time and time again people told them to not let ToA affect RvR in adverse ways, and Mythic time and time again assured us that it was a PvE addition with only mild impact on RvR. lol!


The bugs and general requirements to form huge groups to have any chance of finishing content, and having a good chance of failure after many hours invested, is what made it a game of "have's" vs. "have nots". Even a year after ToA's release, this was still the case with many many more casual players still not being ML10 or having all the artifacts they needed to play their class at a competitive level. (Let's not even talk about what ToA did to the whole fundamental concept of alternate characters that was a piece of what made DAoC a great game with re-play value.)


I think we can all agree almost unanimously that SI was a great expansion all around, and people really felt that ToA for all it's flair and hype was really not as good for the game as SI was. Outside of adding some OPd classes, it was very gentle on RvR balance, and thus was a nice serving of both PvE that had a meaningful but not dominant effect on RvR. What provoked Mythic to want to make something of a grand scale such as ToA was, when SI was clearly a resounding success, is indicative of a problem mentioned by that EA Louse dood as well: They let their success go to their heads.

Once that happened, they believed that anything they touched was divine and players would love it, so they stopped paying attention to the community, apparently even to voices inside the company, etc. and just went off on a god-complex that ultimately got them what they deserved. I'm not even religious, but I know the story of Babylon none the less.


What's really sad to me --as a gamer/customer-- is the fact that no one in the industry has really been able to understand what made DAoC such a success (for it's time), and apparently not even Mythic themselves has a clue or they would have done a better job with WoW. Maybe it was just freakishly good timing, but I'd have to say it's the simple things that mattered most.

1) DAoC had a great launch, unlike pretty much every MMO of it's time. Say what you will about lacking content, rushed content, etc. but the game was stable and players had a blast leveling up to about 20s-30s before it got boring/repetitive and obviously showing the rushed/incomplete parts of the game.

2) The meticulous detail of its combat mechanics was a huge surprise. Archery was like woah! It felt more real then any even single player game had achieved to that date. All the different melee styles, reactionaries, positionals, etc. were also new to the genre or at least in the good way in which Mythic implemented them was.

3) Stealth was implemented very well, also unlike pretty much any game of its time! It's amazing that people complain about Stealth so much so that Mythic foolishly left it out of WAR, and thus killed an entire sub-game that keeps thousands of people occupied in DAoC to this day. A great example of why you can't let the whining masses rule your decision making process. (UO Trammel is another point in case!) The hard part is balancing the listening to your players VALID complaints, and filtering out those complaints that are made by one type of player vs. another type of player, the latter being often simply an invalid whine. It leads to throwing the baby out with the bath water. People sometimes aren't objective enough to see how a play style they say they loathe, still helps their game overall thrive. (Stealthers gives the PK/lone-wolf minded player an outlet inside DAoC, without making them a dominant aspect of other parts of RvR that would kill other peoples' preferred playstyle. We saw this in UO where PKs made it literally impossible to do anything, but on the other hand Tramel was just boring as there was no danger at all. In DAoC you have little to fear from Rogues in general siege/RvR, but they're still there and provide danger that keeps you from just waltzing across a bridge to your nearest docks as a lone Caster.)

4) Solid realism-based GFX. This alone makes it a game approachable by both teens & adults. I personally didn't even bother to buy WoW, and thus also not WAR simply because I don't see myself happy in a world like that. It's too freakish for me. (Same for Aion and most Asian MMOs. No offense, I just can't dig 12' tall swords on 3' - 8' tall creatures.)


I'm sure there is much more, but those are the points that keep me coming back to DAoC. The PvP combat system is great, the graphics are quite fine for my taste and still loads better then WAR/WoW style, and I can solo if I want. (Not "solo" by being thrown into a PUG, but SOLO where I don't ever have to feel bad about going AFK without notice, etc.)

 

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Or someone who enjoys the sense of accomplishment that accompanies overcoming challenges .


So many people have said that games that are super easy with no challenge become boring quickly but gaming companies just won't listen to them.

I know everyone likes to blame it on the younger generation as having no stomach for anything difficult but that's just a cop out.

Pretty much every generation in the history of man has been calling the following one lazier.


It's the game companies that have become lazier...making shallow eye candy for a quick buck instead of building depth and challenge to hold people's interest.


Although having so many people whine that they basically just want a lvl 50 handed to them now because they hate pve and it's a pvp game IS NOT HELPING...

This is an MMORPG not a FPS shooter, if you don't want to build your character YOU ARE IN THE WRONG GENRE...I know many don't want to hear that but well....sorry (not).

The irony is, however, that the biggest whiners ARE the oldschool players...probably same one's who blame it all on the younger players .


FFS during that XP weekend a little while back, just for a goof I leveled a toon from 0-50, templated him, and got him to r4, on hib where I have zero funds. All I had to help was a broke untemplated 50 Ranger. In like 15 hours played all that.

That is a complete JOKE for a MMORPG. A JOKE .

Edit to add - The answer to having old stale pve content in an MMORPG is not to let everyone skip pve ffs, it's to build new challenging and enjoyable pve. Mythic has it all backwards.... . Like I said it's the game companies that have become lazy .

 

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