I disagree with you on many levels. A casual player will be able to put at most an hour or 2 a night. If it took you 15 hours knowing the tricks of the trade this could easily be weeks for a casual player. Thats quite a bit of time to get to the real game. I'd say things are right about where they should be. The more you go on about PVE being the core of this game just goes to show how much you don't get it.

 

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I disagree on so many levels. TOA was a shiny penny with arsenic buried inside it. It looked nice at first, and it took months for the horrific effect on rvr balance to become obvious. People who never wanted to do more pve figured out that they either had to bow to the requirement to do TOA or quit. Many quit. The mere thought of being zephyred, grappled, or hit with some other gay toa ability sickens me. That's probably the second biggest reason I won't come back.

Either you knew 2 people and since those 2 people left you didn't know anyone during ToA and that is why "more people left for SI" or you are trolling because that is a ridiculous statement.

 

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A lot of people that left because of SI additions didn't even leave during SI. I knew more than a dozen people that quit over the years because of bonedancers alone. And at least as many that left over animists. I personally canceled my account for a while when bonedancers became very popular in NF because I was sick of dealing with the bullshit.

But like I said... I personally know nobody that left because of ToA. You can say you disagree with me but that doesn't make sense at all. I am making a personal observation not posting an opinion. You may very well have had a different experience so I will assume that's what you mean.

 

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Always enjoyed your postings, you always came across as a level headed person, but many did in fact leave due to ToA. This is ironic in a sense because, pre-ToA, Mythic asked the community what they wanted, and many responded with 'large scale type encounters'. Something that would take a battlegroup to do. Mythic gave people what they wanted and it backfired in a way. DAoC has been around for ages, as you know, and soo many things can be blamed for loss of subs:

LA nerf
CD nerf
Archery nerf.
OP'd animist and bains and bonedancers.
OP'd Warlocks, I mention them seperate because they really pissed off so many people.
Needing 2 accounts due to Bot buffs being that effective.
ToA
Release of WoW
Release of WAR, Aion, etc.
Cross realming, and killing of community with crafting in houses and task dungeons are also factors.

All of the above caused people to leave. Ultimately, I think the element of time and people always searching for a better, different MMO experience hurt more than anything. 'The grass is greener' on the other side of the hill syndrome.
I think if many could go back in time, and knew what we know today, DAoC would be a much more populated game. We had a great thing and in some ways, didn't realize it. Speaking for myself, I would done less realm hopping-stayed in one home/realm/server. I would have skipped WAR and Aion, etc.

 

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I think imbalances from ToA gear in RvR had less of a direct negative impact on the game than the change in player end-game mentality.

ToA really brought out the loot-lust / gear elitism mentality in players more than any other gear addition (like SI dungeons) and it really hurt the community. Our guild split at the time because half the guild wanted the extreme gear progression and others vehemently rejected it. This mentality caused a lot of inner-realm conflict and hostility.

When I started DAoC on Percival in 2002, it was ridiculous at how many random people would come up to me (as an obvious newbie) and offer me random gold and hand-me-down gear to help me get started. In ToA era, that had all but disappeared. It also killed roleplaying.


RvR elitism and New Frontiers played another big role. I loved NF for the first few weeks purely because it was something different, but I grew to hate it. There should never have been additional objective points beyond what we had in OF.

I don't think the ToA gear imbalance really played as much of a factor as people like to believe. It was the affect on the community.

 

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It wasn't just the gear. It was many things, like a thousand small cuts. And, not just TOA. Overpowered and broken classes, WoW, radar, bugs, the red headed stepchild status, etc...etc...etc...

 

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Don't get me wrong. I know people did in fact quit over ToA, probably a lot at that. What I am saying is that there were a few people early on that made posts about quitting over ToA and it caught on and became a popular attitude on these boards and people just started copy and pasting the sentiment because it was the popular thing to do rather than because it was their actual experience. People would bash ToA and get a resounding amount of support and praise on these boards. I have seen many people posting this sentiment over the years that turned out to have never played the game during ToA at all and others that never played the game before ToA came out, when you get to talking to them.

For years and years everyone just assumed it was true that ToA killed the game's population until someone actually did the research and showed everyone the graphs that actually showed that ToA had the game's highest population for a year after release and that the game didn't go downhill in that regard util WoW and Catacombs came out. At that point the argument took a strange turn and no longer did ToA kill the population... it killed the spirit of the game and everyone just happened to quit because of ToA a year later when WoW came out.

I have also had many conversations with people on these boards that say they quit because of ToA and when you talk to them it was becasue of bots, or clustering opening up crossrealming and relic hopping, and other issues that happened during or after ToA that weren't necessarily able to be directly attributed to the expansion itself.

Really what I am trying to say is that the attitudes on these boards sometimes vary wildly from the actual attitudes of people in-game and are often poisoned by people that have not even played this game for years that are bitter about something or just here to entertain themselves. I never seem to meet people in-game that hate ToA with even an iota of the hatred expressed on the VN. But once again I am not saying they don't exist or are even small in number. I am just expressing a personal experience.

 

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I think everyone knows VNBoards have always been the vocal minority and an amplifier of issues. "VNBoards, we know drama"

I think some would argue that Mythic has been guilty of listening to that vocal minority sometimes when they shouldn't have. And, they have not listened when they needed to. It's a balance that every company like this struggles with.

 

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Both games are a ton of fun. Realm wars and 8v8 are unmatched in DAoC, and scenario after scenario are awesome in WAR. Isn't the real issue a dispersion of players across too many games right now? Aion looks great, WoW continues to have large numbers and Cataclysm will cause a population issue for a while in other games. Heck I even want to open good old EQ sometimes. Then there is the console draw. So as more and more new games come out, and people evolve, how do you maintain what once was...probably can't do it forever.