Right now Eve-Online worldwide concurrent subscribers are surpassing DAoC’s ones by a few hundreds. I didn’t see this happening before. Just saying.

Today I decided to log back in DAoC after a long time. If I don’t have faith in a game company I just don’t feel like playing, not even for some minutes. I’m unable to enjoy a moment if I don’t have faith in the future and DAoC has always been in a unsteady balance. Some things convince me but the great majority do not and I’m always reconsidering if I should support it or not. There were some new pointless polls (which I decided to boycott) welcoming me and while I was logging in I also found some new Warhammer screenshots and the desire to play died there.

It’s a couple of months that I don’t play and the reason is still the same. I have little faith in Mythic and I see Warhammer as a huge conflict of interests that no one wants to consider. Mark Jacobs repeats it’s not DAoC 2 but the stupidity of this claim is obvious. What’s Warhammer if not “a PvP alternative to WoW”? It could be its slogan and I’m sure it will be marketed, implicitly or explicitly, that way.

The little infos about the PvP model it will adopt makes it look like an improved version of DAoC with some elements borrowed from WoW. What could you desire more? It seems a solid foundation to build upon. This is what people say. Instead for me this just amplifies the same conflict of interest. Why these ideas weren’t use to improve DAoC’s RvR?

The screenshots aren’t that awful. Even if I would have chosen a different style, I like the orc model. The little legs and the big bodies have some charm, the long faces with the thick necks appropriate (the thumbs are too long, though). With a good animation it could have a decent personality, I imagine it wobbling left and right while running. The dwarf model instead needs much more work to be appealing. Both seem to have already bad clipping issues with the head sinking in the left shoulder (see images 1, 4 and 6). I do hope that they use unique animations for all races.

Considering the horrible situation of PvP mmorpgs, bringing another one to the market isn’t going to be all that hard. DAoC didn’t move forward nor backward along these years and WoW fucked up all the potential it had thanks to a “brilliant” design. But Warhammer is the direction where DAoC should have moved along these years instead of remain immoble.

At the end all my comments are pretty much pointless. I want to find reasons to hate Warhammer. Give me more. I’ve already decided I’ll stick with DAoC till the end. I won’t play Warhammer’s beta, nor at release. It can do without me. I believe it won’t be able to reach even DAoC’s subscription numbers when it was at its peak (260k or so). I want it to fail because they wasted too many occasions and resources. I want it to fail because the conflict of interest is still waiting for an answer and you don’t turn your back to a playerbase as Mythic did. Change forum, put on another mask. You won’t fool me.

I find Mark Jacobs arrogant and self righteous. I’m not passing judgments, it’s just the way I feel when I read something he wrote. The truth is that with Lum gone I’ve lost the little faith I had left in Mythic and the more time passes the worst it gets. It’s like being slightly above the water or slightly below, it changes completely the perspective at how you see things. I never digested Warhammer stepping on DAoC’s toes and Mythic’s lack of honest answer about the two. I’m not liking how things are developing, at all.

There’s a lot of disaffection towards Mythic. The game is still solid but it is becoming another UO. People play it not for what it is today, but as a nostalgic souvenir. Stuck in the past. All the people I see praising Mythic and still having faith in it are people who stopped to play their games long ago or never stayed for more than a couple of months. Hypocrites.

I just have no faith. I don’t see Mythic proposing anything that truly deserves some interest. They don’t have ideas, they don’t have enthusiasm. DAoC’s team isn’t doing badly but it’s still all about conservative work that doesn’t really go anywhere. The game is “maintained”. I guess the continued support to DAoC just means that they are going to milk it till it remains profitable.

I think it will be a while before I’ll have again the “courage” to put my foot back in DAoC. I don’t feel optimist lately. Can’t help it.

We love DAoC and by continuing to improve and invest in the game, it will be able stand up in the face of current and future competition. We believe by continuing to drive DAoC’s evolution, it will remain the top RvR-based MMORPG as well as one of the top MMORPGs in the world. If you agree with us, we’re willing to put in the time and investment to make it happen.