not in my case. I was a vocal hater before it was cool, starting with the break with the lore.

And yet, I know three entire guilds that disappeared in the year following release of ToA. The members of which went to other MMO's (other than WoW - oddly, only one that I ever talked to later went to WoW).

The biggest issue with ToA was that it made your nominal allies (your realmmates) your opponents when it came to things like artifacts.

Well, that and that much of it wasn't doable without a large guild that was willing to do the ML's/arties/etc over and over again as new members reached the point of needing that sort of thing.

 

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Bingo! Peeps seem to forget you had to be the one to get the drop. People were vicious to each other and the whining was epic.I remember the first day I played DAoC, I had to kill the bear Svartmoln. I was invited to a group on newbies. One of the group members found him and killed him and I got the hide for my quest! I thought it was amazing we didn't have to kill the bear 67 million times until everyone in the group got their hide.ToA was (in a sense) completely opposite of this philosophy.

 

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And yet I made a lot of friends doing toa encounters. I made lots of friends of people that were farming encounters and let me in to get the credit and/or artifact drop. I then in return learned how to do many encounters that required specific classes and bot combinations and got credit for others and had fun. I cannot remember how many dozens of people I ran through quests like the Ebon hide bracer on my minstrel where I could zip them through it, back before maps of ToA came out and it was no longer cool to work as a guide when you knew the land and mobs where to go by memory. I made so many friends over the years taking strangers through encounters they were having trouble with. We used to see people wiping whole battlegroups trying to do encounters that my brother and I could do with just the two of us logging multiple accounts. We would end up logging on and having them essentially go afk while we did the encounters for them and they always remembered us and tried to start doing the same for others. Just like early on we had people do the same for us.

It works both ways and shows that people are both helpful and cannibalistic of their own realm and once again people only seem to look at the negative aspects when they have an agenda or are trying to make vn drama.

Someone posts it. Someone else quotes it. Someone else copies and pastes it and it goes from there. And it even gets defended in other ways too. Like I said before that personally I knew lots that quit because of SI. Well... I have only seen one or two others try to ever say anything bad about SI because its the popular opinion here that SI was the best thing ever and everyone defends it regardless of the facts and tends to bash anyone that says anything against it. It was a good and bad expansion. Everyone knows the good points but people seem to overlook the dangerous theme of expansion classes it introduced where the new classes broke the rules that made the game and were obviously overpowered and imbalanced in an extreme fashion that actually caused more damage and discontent with the game than any other single issue.

 

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My guess would be that World of Warcraft did more to hurt Camelot's subscription numbers than any other event. Good lord, a lot of people play that game. I played it myself for the last 6 months, just to see what all the fuss was about.

It's a very slick experience, but with some obvious differences in design philosophy. You hear a lot about Blizzard's polish, which is totally true, but their real mastery is in designing games that are more addictive than crack. Daily and weekly repeatable quest rewards, with high benefits, lots of fluff to provide time and money sinks, very difficult high-end content that can only be done once a week, etc., keep you coming back to get those prestigious/rare/time-consuming rewards.

The problem for me was that PvP in WoW just isn't satisfying -- arena is probably the best, but has matchmaking, time limit, and gear progression issues; battlegrounds can be fun but have no progression; spontaneous world PvP is almost nonexistent and is barely rewarded at all.

Also, once I decided to cancel, I realized how repetitive it was doing the same high-end raid content week after week, hoping for the one item I needed, and that I would win it on the one chance I had to run the raid. Compare that to Classic/SI/TOA/Cats/Labyrinth, and the amount of content available for a level 50 to conquer in DAOC. My necromancer in alb (plus bot and wife's heretic) spent years trying to figure out all those encounters, and farm things that no one had farmed before, just for the satisfaction of having beaten them. (Figuring out how to necro my way through pre-nerf ML8, including Talos, was one of my most memorable gaming experiences ever.) WoW basically has one end-game dungeon at a time, that you can't do with less than 10 or 25 people, and that you do week after week hoping for your no-trade drops. You're a hamster on a wheel, and you get scraps of cheese at random reinforcement intervals to keep you going. But it's very effective at keeping players logging on regularly, which keeps population high, which is appealing to new players, and leads to the critical mass they have today.

 

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I see what you're saying about the attitude being contagious, in a way.


When ToA first came out, it was the casual player's nightmare. I'm sure this isn't an original argument but I personally didn't have the time to sit for hours and hours to accomplish any of the MLs. And the process of getting artifacts took entirely too long. Remember, this is when ToA first came out. The power gamers didn't have issues, people with only an hour or two to spend on a gaming session did.


Shrouded Isles was the best expansion, no doubt.

 

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SI dungeon raids took forever too. I think there were some good parts to Shrouded Isles, but it really started the trend. It just wasn't as pronounced.

It introduced some gear lust and hard-to-get items. ToA just took that and amplified it by about a billion.

 

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I came across the pre-TOA Albion raid guide recently, which brought back tons of memories. This line in particular made me smile:

"The respawn time in Caer Sidi is 8-10 hours after the first Keylord (the weakest type of boss) is killed, and the whole place respawns at once, so moving through is a race against the clock."

The implication of course was that you had to hurry, because you had *only 8 hours straight* to complete Sidi.

 

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No. People think for themselves and say the trials of abortions for what they were.

I forgot about the Sidi raids. I went on one that made it to the 3rd guy, whatever that means.

 

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