About two weeks passed from when I praised the last group of additions/fixes to DAoC. Yesterday the patch was moved from the test server to live. It didn’t take too much research on the forum to find comments about “things gone wrong”, because, as always, Mythic is able to do the most obvious mistakes.

Now I won’t touch the class issues because it’s an old argument that matters more in the relationship between the developers and the players than the actual game mechanics. The new mistake is instead the Tower Razing mechanic that I was expecting as a major improvement. Some players are strongly criticizing it as a letdown and when I delved into it some more to understand why, I discovered that the model I imagined in my head (since I’m not playing the game anymore) was actually different from the one implemented.

In a simple way: this new mechanic was SEVERELY needed because, before, the sieges were the most awfully boring thing you can conceive. The siege game was some sort of “tennis simulation” with two zergs of players shooting each other for hours and no concrete consequence aside slowly milking realm points from repeated kills. It was STATIC. The towers didn’t provide enough feedback and impact on the battlefield to create a variety of situations. They moved from being undefended towers that still required an high amount of time to conquer (so: long and boring PvE sessions by fighting NPC guards and beating a door) to endless sieges at well-protected towers. Sieges that only produced actual consequences when one of the side simply chosed to give up and do something slightly less repetitive than staring an uneventful tennis match. Exhausting victories.

This is why I welcomed the Tower Razing idea as a good change in a critical zone of the gameplay. If those damn towers can CRUMBLE, they can finally provide that dynamism that was severely lacking. A crumbling tower is a type of interaction with the environment that forces a change. You CANNOT stay in the same place and play tennis for hours because at some point the tower will crumble. Or the players inside (the defenders) start to do some serious action to keep it up and DEFEND, and COUNTERATTACK, or the tower will crumble under their feet. At that point the attacker will rush in because it’s not anymore possible to defend the door with AoE spells. The proposed system plugs in the game that dynamism and variety of situations that was strongly needed. An erosion of the bad habits in the actions of the players that were strongly supported by a badly designed gameplay. So, finally, an actual impact of a siege WITH CONSEQUENCES.

What went wrong? The absurd. They simply overdid the schema. They moved from a static model to one so dynamic that it basically doesn’t matter anymore. So is the “error” a matter of a careful balancing process that requires an accurate testing phase? NO. The error, as I said at the beginning, is at THE BASIC LEVEL. The error isn’t in the “dose” of the change, but in its FORM. In its coherence. This is why it’s a DESIGN mistake and not a balance mistake. The result is unbalanced but the cause is at the source.

So again, what went wrong? They implemented, as they often do, an half-idea. Without completeing it in its essence and bringing it to the game as a compromise. A compromise that now is correctly criticized by the players. The error is that these towers have effectively lost their defenses (so they crumble, finally), they have effectively brought dynamism to the battlefield but they ALSO RETAINED all their roles IN the logic of the game. Basically they crumble and they are destroyed but EVEN THEN they retain their role in the battlefield. I won’t go on now explaining how DAoC’s PvP works, how the towers are connected to the keeps and so on but it should be enough to know that those towers have roles and they aren’t simply hotspots where to have some fun. There’s a meta-game and some sort of conquest system in the game and this layer is directly connected to the role of the towers.

Now, by design, we have towers that finally can be destroyed, breaking that immobility that was a serious problem in the game BUT at the same time, while the tower crumbles – so becomes weak and easy to conquer, it RETAINS its full role and function on the meta-game. THIS IS THE ERROR. The tower is reduced to pebbles and rubbish but you still have a lord and four guards standing proudly in the middle. The role of the tower is there. The structure crumbles but the ESSENCE DOESN’T.

What this means? That when a tower is destroyed it becomes an easy prey. Impossible to defend. Yes, you can go and conquer it easily because there’s zero protection, but at the same time another realm can repeat that pattern. What happens is that instead of introducing DYNAMISM into the system, they introduce INSTABILITY. These towers keep switching owner in a matter of minutes till this whole meta-layer simply doesn’t matter anymore. It’s so rapidly changing that it’s impossible for the players to care about it. It’s impossible to effectively defend a tower. The persistence of the game vanishes completely in an unstable situation. This is why they (apparently) OVERDID the change and why (apparently) it looks like a balance problem.

But it isn’t balance. The design mistake is to have those towers RETAIN THEIR ROLE. How to fix this? You fix this point and COMPLETE the original idea. If the STRUCTURE crumbles, also the role of the tower MUST GO. The destroyed tower cannot become a “no man’s land” that everyone can temporarily use. If something breaks you cannot use it. It’s the FUNCTION the heart, what is supposed TO NOT WORK. That’s the principle. Once a tower is LOST, and destroyed it must LOSE its role and its function. Temporarily. This time-gap is already there because the tower will slowly repair on its own. What the design is missing is to link this repair time to a restoration of the function, not just of the “edges” and walls.

That’s why I said I was imagining the idea implemented in a different way. I was giving for granted (because, you know, it makes sense) that a crumbled tower would lose its role.