After one week trying, I was finally able to join a group in DAoC. We still sit and wait for the majority of the time and I got less than 2k or RPs in total, but at least it was something.

The problems I see are still the same. From a side the RvR should be made more alive, because right now the game is extremely specialized into 8vs8 groups and nothing else. From the other the game needs some value in the PvE side because the shameless use of the instances dumbed everything down to an unacceptable level. A game with just PvP cannot survive and the success lies in the blend between the two.

In the first case (making the RvR pivot some more around the keeps and sieges, the actual RvR) my idea on the open PvP model could be easily adapted to achieve the same goals:

What about rewarding more RPs the more you fight closer to a keep?

Think to it like a ‘gravity center’, toward which people are attracted.

It would also help casual players to find groups more easily since not the whole game would be based on 8vs8 specialized, closed groups.

This idea could work for a very simple reason:
If they reward A LOT more RPs for conquering towers and keeps, we could arrive at a scenario where the realms AVOID each other to keep farming RPs while fighting just the guards (since long sieges would be an useless delay that both sides would like to avoid).

Instead if the keeps are transformed into gravity centers that multiply the RPs the closer you are, the points would still come from the “direct kills”, so promoting the actual PvP instead of players vs guards.

The idea is to use the keeps and towers as “gravity centers”, or “hot spots”. Conceiving the PvP activity as a weight that needs to be attracted toward the keeps, working as a “focus”. A “rubber band” that keeps trying to pull you back through the incentive to the RPs. So that fighting around and inside the keeps would become more desirable than how it is right now.

This could work, it could make the RvR more accessible for the casual players, make the groups a little more varied and less specialized. There would be some minor problems to adapt other parts of the game that were planned on different premises (like Agramon) but nothing that it is impossible to solve.

The point is to “valorize” that unique RvR model that DAoC can offer. This model is less about specialized 8vs8 and more about the broader level of sieges and keeps warfare. The strategy would be about making this part more desirable, since right now it’s the worst way to get RPs.

Other minor things that I would like to see fixed/adjusted:
– The emote spam. It shouldn’t be too hard to add a 10 seconds cooldown to each emote to prevent excessive spam. It would also make the animations more smooth instead of having them overlapping unrealistically. Ther same for the sound emotes.
– The jump code. This needs to be completely rewritten from scratch. Right now there’s just the “lag-jumping” with people flying to the sky and then rubberbanding back to the ground. You could see a player on a horse jumping in the place and fly six meters in the air. This is a problem that is in the game since release and that is also related to the z-axis movement that looks horrible even underwater. It should be fixed once for all.
– The horses. Make the model tilt accordingly to the inclination of the terrain. DAoC has already the code to do this, it just needs to be applied to the players mounts.
– Boats. This is the most badly impemented system in the whole game. The controls to use and move the boats are terrible, the movement is always jerky and the rubberbanding a constant (along with players falling in the water or ‘ghosting’ everywhere). The idea would be to rewrite the controls so that the movement is “twitch”. You apply the exact same scheme of the movement of a car. With simple acceleration routines, reverse gear and reduced turning rates. It would be enough to make the situation much better.

About The PvE I have some ideas, I have already explained a few. It’s hard to wrap everything up because the PvE side needs to be heavily reorganized and this approach wouldn’t work well with all the different expanasions, plus the one in development (that I’m dreading). I’m quite sure that Mythic isn’t going to fix anything so that they can push a new model right into Warhammer.