A good general point of view about DAoC on F13:

AlteredOne:
At one point in DAOC, my guild had over 100 active members, and was one of the top 5 biggest guilds on our server. Now there are about ten semi-active members, most of whom farm ToA artifacts endlessly with buffbots. The ToA “arms race” is truly ungodly. You can get artifacts for nearly every equipment slot, and take weeks leveling each one. The true catassers might have multiple artifacts on a half-dozen high-level toons at this point.

Agreed on looking at the Battlegrounds for solutions, but I think Mythic is way behind the curve at this point. Last year’s “Frontiers” free expansion was supposed to be the great RvR revamp. Instead it drove a ton of people out of RvR, once they got over the novelty of the new gigantic keep sieges. I spent a couple weeks participating in massive ranged standoff battles, before I realized it simply was not fun. 90% of the players were just “farming realm points,” with almost no tactics or strategy involved. The other 10% were the uber-groups, who were simply more efficient at farming the sheep herd.

And, to complete, Walt admits that ToA was better if it was instanced and aimed at small groups:

If you’ll note, in the last few patches, with the exception of 1.73 – the launch of Catacombs, we’ve made numerous changes that make it easier to complete many of the ML’s.

We’ll continue the process in the future – particularly with the instancing technology that we now have. But progress will be measured in months, not days.

Yes, when they launched, in many cases they needed a zerg, and there were often bugs. Now, we have no known bugs – and we’re working on the encounters.