This is a comment I wrote at Q23 about the upcoming expansion for DAoC, “Catacombs”. I’m not in beta and this is just a description about how I “feel” about it. About what is available (like the screenshots) and about my expectations (or “design guidelines I would follow if I was working at Mythic”):

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For now I’ll say that I agree with Walt: yes, those zones look *impressive*.

An aspect that in DAoC always sucked was the level design. Aside a few rare exceptions (Darkness Falls is acceptable) the design of dungeons and open-air zones is really plain and uninteresting. Even if the graphic quality is ok the possibilities of the engine are never used. No originality, just generic locations that look more randomly generated than handcrafted. No cohesion, no sense of wonder, no immersion.

The screenshots I’ve seen from Catacombs are impressive, as I said. I can see that the texture artist is the same of ToA and New Frontier and I always *loved* his work. I consider him (whoever he is) one of the best artist available out there. But aside this I noticed an improvement on the design of the zones themselves, and not just the textures.

So, I found myself murmuring “cool”. Never happened before while looking at a zone in DAoC.

Instead I still consider the new characters models disappointing. I don’t like the change from a “fantasy” style to a more realistic style. This beside the tech. The textures seems reused and bad. I don’t like the expressions and I dislike even more the models. The arms and the legs in particular are poor (no elbows). Same for the hands and overall impact of the shape of the body.

So not only I don’t like the art *at all*. But I don’t even appreciate the change of the style and I also expect more lag since the technical quality is increased. Something that DAoC’s generally horrible (as: performance and bugs) engine didn’t need.

The idea to link dungeons and underground zones is cool. Same for the new transportation system. I cannot say anything about the actual content but I have a few hopes:

1- It will offer, finally, a decent PvE, from level 1 to 50. With quests that are *fun* to do and not a PLAGUE and a BURDEN (like they are in DAoC till now, every single one). As a must: I don’t want to be forced to spoil the quest by being FORCED to look at a spoiler site. The objectives of the quests should be precise, I don’t want anymore to spend real hours to find a goddamn NPC, to wait a spawn or to grind something. The quests should pivot around *fun* (and challenging) gameplay elements.

2- The instancing will be used to offer fun and balanced experiences. Challenging and hard for a set number of players and levels. Zerg forbidden.
2a – Buffbots *forbidden* in instances. And so their effectivity. No buff and then enter the instance. The buff effects MUST drop. (this will sell me the game)
3- It’s easy to play and isn’t based solely on timesinks and grind to hide the fact that there isn’t content to offer. (ToA was JUST that)
4- It’s easy to experience, without requiring too many hours of continuous play and various hours of preparation before the start of an event.
5- It’s self-consistent. Without invulnerable monsters that can be killed only in absurd ways that you ARE FORCED to discover on spoiler sites. If there are puzzles the game has to offer DIRECTLY the possibilty to find their solution. And they have to MAKE SENSE.
6- The possibilty to follow and *read* the story with my own pace. I don’t accept a zerg leaders shouting at me “DON’T FUCKING TRY TO SPEAK TO THE NPC OR YOU’LL RUIN THE ENCOUNTER!!”
7- The experience should feel like a possible and viable (yes, even long) *journey*. For everyone. I don’t want to be stuck because I cannot find a zerg under my control to offer me the support. I don’t want to grind for hours or camp a spot forever. I don’t want to see parts of the game that are technically unreachable because I’m not backupped by a whole guild, because I don’t have uber leet equipment and five buffbots.

And

8- I don’t want to have to drop the game because of technical problems like memory leaks, graphical bugs and incompatibilities that are still completely overlooked.

Okay, perhaps there’s more that now I cannot remember. We’ll see how it will perform at release. Those are my expectations.

Haemish reviews the new DAoC patch on F13:

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Haemish:
My first few nights in DAoC on my own account, as opposed to an account which had a level 50 on it, were not so fun. I discovered the one flaw of all PVP games; if there are no opponents, there is no PVP. I quickly leveled to 4 and found that the level 1-4 battlegrounds were barren of players. Fair enough, leveling up to 5 should take no time. Only when I did, there was no one in the level 5 battlegrounds either. Gritting my teeth, I jumped back on the PVE level treadmill and worked my way up to 10. And since this was before the free level system was enacted, I experienced every one of those levels. The level 10-14 battleground was similarly empty. With a heavy sigh, my mind began to put two and two together.

With the ability to make /level 20 characters for anyone who’d already done the treadmill, very few people bothered to level up a character the old-fashioned way. This hypothesis was proven not only by the wasteland that was the level 1-19 battlegrounds, but by the continuous echo heard in all the old world zones, as well as in the Shrouded Isles zones of the same levels. You could have nuked all the zone servers for all the Classic and Shrouded Isles zones and not disturbed enough people to form a football team. I managed to get a group all of twice the entire time from level 1-20, and that was with a /level 20 character who was trying out an alt on another server than his primary. I’m not going to go so far as to say there are no new players coming into the game, but there weren’t many on my server.
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Why I post this? Because even Mythic realized the same issues:

Finally, in any MMO, eventually there comes a time when most of the players online are experienced players and are playing characters that are mid or advanced level. This makes it much harder and tedious for a new player (or an experienced player leveling a new character) to advance their character in levels, as they cannot find other players to group with or to help them.

Now that Camelot is nearly three years old, it is becoming harder and harder for low-level players to find groups, which results in long leveling times and frustration.

This is exactly what Haemish noted. The point is that he joined the game AFTER Mythic deployed their “fixes”.

Congratulations Mythic, you won a “Cesspit Award”!

Continuation:
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Haemish:
At around level 23, I maxed out the number of realm points I could get from that particular battleground, and so foolishly decided to level out of Thidranki and into the next battleground, Braemar, made for level 25-29.

And suddenly, the PVP stopped. Braemar was bereft of players, both opponents and friends, and suddenly I was adrift again.

Now, it wasn’t as if I walked into Braemar once at 3 AM, found no one and left. No, I came back three or four times over the next few days, in prime time and on weekends, and never found more than two opponents. I resolved that I would level up again, just once more, to level 30 in order to test out Wilton, for levels 30-34.

It isn’t that I didn’t want to group; but even in the 20’s, finding anyone to group with was next to impossible.

When I finally reached Wilton, battered and bored, I found it only slightly more active than Braemar. In six different occasions, spread over primetime, late night and afternoon hours, I had a total of two fights, and only one which involved more than four people in total. That was more than enough evidence for me. I knew I’d never have the patience to make it to 50, nor would I have the interest in achieving the Master Levels of the Trials of Atlantis expansion, feats which are rumored to contain more catass in them than the entire cast of Cats.

After two months, I cancelled my subscription.

I seem to be able to just spit venom on DAoC while everyone starts to define me a WoW fanboy.

I tried hard to do some RvR with my level 50 wizard on Merlin in the last two hours but I’m damn bored and got no more than 1k of Realm Points in total.

Part of the problem are the players, the other part is the design of the game. Too much time sitting on a keep and staring at a wall. The real action is like 2% of the whole time. But I also don’t care anymore at trying to discover where the flaws are.

I also noticed that noone even cares to group anymore.

Mezz, root, interrupts … Bah. A stack of problems that noone even cares anymore to consider.

Let’s sleep. I hope to not have nightmares with buffbots.

Mythic feels that the end is close. This is what appeared in their patch notes page:

Living life is fun and we’ve just begun
To get our share of the world’s delights
(HIGH!) high hopes we have for the future
And our goal’s in sight
(WE!) no we don’t get depressed
Here’s what we call our golden rule
Have faith in you and the things you do

Getting serious: the high hopes for the future work only if you have the humility of understanding the errors to see where you can improve.

The faith won’t save anyone without humility and honesty.

Just a funny comment from the Vault about DAoC and Team Leaders after the debacle:

How many times do I have to post this.

The original devs were kidnapped and replaced by flying monkeys shortly after SI was released.

Its the ONLY explanation that seems to fit.

The title (and part of the thread) must be taken with some sense of humor.

Nearly four months ago I wrote various posts on a long thread to discuss the new RvR expansion and a few critical aspects of the game, both inside and outside it. Most of them also pointed and analyzed the last year. After four months Mythic is smart enough to discover the same issues:

This is about the gap between new and old players:

HRose:
The point is that it was a bad idea from the start and I still think it damaged the game instead of improving it. It’s what happens everywhere. Instead of solving the problem they solve the consequence of the problem. Levelling is unfun? Ok, we cut that part. Not solving it (and increasing the gap between a new player and the experienced one).

Instead of pushing experienced players toward the new ones, they are pushing them apart (again). /level 20 was the same. It had just the result of producing newbies alone in their condition, instead of letting the experienced one to help them, in particular during the earlier levels. And DAoC is still one of the less newbie-friendly games around.

Mythic realizes (?):

Mythic:
Finally, in any MMO, eventually there comes a time when most of the players online are experienced players and are playing characters that are mid or advanced level. This makes it much harder and tedious for a new player (or an experienced player leveling a new character) to advance their character in levels, as they cannot find other players to group with or to help them.

Now that Camelot is nearly three years old, it is becoming harder and harder for low-level players to find groups, which results in long leveling times and frustration.

Alternate advancement:

HRose:
Even here there’s the obvious example that they need *systems* to solve the problems and not just play with the ruleset. Instead of cutting one part of the level grind they should work toward making it optional. For example by offering alternated ways to advance, like the battlegrounds.

A month later Mythic introduced battlegrounds from level 1 to 44.

And the population imbalances.

HRose:
The hard part is the population umbalance, since you cannot force the players to go where you need them. Other solutions are more complex and less trivial and it’s about the tactical gameplay you offer. Mythic has done a little, little step in this direction with “New Frontier”.

Mythic:
We have made some changes in the game over the last few months to try to alleviate the problem where one Realm dominates a server. So far, these additions have not made enough of a difference

HRose:
The idea here is to add “the fun” and let small groups of players to interfere without the need of a huge zerg (or many zergs). The way to allow this is to affect how the keep upgrades work. A big realm should be weaker the more it will expand. The more you go further the more you’ll loose in defence because the line grows longer and weaker.

Mythic:
To alleviate the situation where one Realm can dominate in RvR by taking all or most of the keeps and Relics, we plan to create a system where the more “control” one Realm has on the RvR battlefield, the harder it is for them to hold on to keeps and Relics.

HRose:
My idea is to create a general “pool” for the keep’s upgrades. Like a “cap”. The *less* keeps you own the more you can enhance them. This gives the possibility to an underpopulated realm to build a tight and strong headquarter, very hard to take over even in the worst, most unbalanced solution.

Mythic:
Keep upgrade times will scale down based on the number of keeps a Realm controls. This is already in the game, but we are making it so if a Realm controls only 1 or two keeps, they get extremely fast upgrade times, and if a Realm is totally dominating (as in they control over 15 keeps), then their upgrade times will be longer.

HRose:
I really believe that the only way to address the population unbalance is to make the gameplay for them *more interesting*. Transforming a problem in a strength.

Mythic:
As all of you know, there are Realm balance problems on some servers, where one Realm simply has more active players – an advantage that leads them to dominate the RvR battlefield. There is also a situation on some servers where one Realm dominates the RvR battlefield, even though they don’t physically have greater numbers. Taken to the extreme, this situation results in such demoralized opponents that the other Realms see no purpose in continuing to fight.

There’s a lot more but the other posts I wrote back in February are all lost. I still think that despite Mythic “copied” (late) my ideas, the implementation is still sub-par compared to what I wrote (you can go check). In particular when they tried to solve the “zerg rush” adding more timesinks (res sickness). My solution works better and makes the game more fun. DAoC’s players with the patience to read can confirm. And even the population imbalances reported above. Solved once again with a time-based gameplay (Mythic designers aren’t able to think anything else, it seems: timesinks, time penalites and time bonuses).

So, not only they copy, but they do it badly. :D

Now. What should I have to learn from this terribly stimulating and fascinating genre when I’m able to analize and anticipate the results, the solutions, the reactions and the consequent mistakes? What if everything becomes so obvious?

Well, this time is Mythic to answer:

Mythic:
So, what do these facts have to do with this letter? Plenty! No design and testing process for a game system as complicated as New Frontiers, let alone DAoC, can be completed without errors. After all, even with the heaviest and most exhaustive testing on Pendragon to date, there is nothing like a quarter of a million subscribers actually playing the game LIVE worldwide to find its flaws.

My critique goes on, despite I’m starting to feel like there’s not much left to learn and discover.