One of the things I hate in DAoC is the client. It has been always the biggest weakness of the game with all its limitations and odd behaviours.

The most annoying problem is that there is no way to properly resize the client when playing in windowed mode and if you set it at your screen resolution the game window goes out of the screen and even prevents you to use the taskbar. The only choice is then to set the client resolution to be smaller than your screen, but this is also so annoying because you cannot use all the space available and you have to stare at the desktop or another window behind the client window.

No, Mythic didn’t suddenly wake up to work on the client as they should from a long time, but I discovered a program that at least overrides the client window and allows to play with it covering the whole screen without covering the taskbar at bottom.

Unfortunately the program still cannot remove the borders of the client window, nor it can dynamically resize actual resolution but it can at least automatically move it so that the borders aren’t shown, allowing you to play with the game at the same resolution of the screen. The program is quite simple, you just select the DAoC window from a menu listing all the running programs and then select the fullscreen option and “trigger it”.

It isn’t perfect but a huge improvement for me. Mythic should really start to learn how much are important these basic functionalities that they have ignored for far too long. You know, something like a better mouse sensibility or the possibility to change server without having to quit and restart. But I guess they are too busy on Warhammer to care about an acient game that when it comes to basic systems didn’t improve at all (controls, options, interface, pathing code, casting interrupts, ghosting issues, lagcasting, lagjumping, surface/dive in the water, steep terrain, the possibility to relong on a lag disconnect without having to restart and so on for a very long list that just keeps growing).

(okay, I’m tired. Sorry for the title, ok?)

I’ll start with a post from Mark Jacobs on their virginal community as an excuse to write down some notes that I was planning from quite a while: DAoC and PvE.

Folks,

Instancing is indeed a tool which, as it already has been said, is neither good nor evil. It has some very, very good uses but it can be abused. Thus, we will use instancing in a number of ways but not so that they destroy the sense of being part of an MMO.

As to DAoC, yes, we are doing it very well there but I think we can do it even better here.

Mark

He doesn’t say anything as always, but there’s that comment about DAoC and the use of instancing technology: “We are doing it very well”.

Wow, that’s a news. I’ve yet to see someone praising these wonderful instances that DAoC is supposed to have, because it would be really a novelty. If there’s ONE GAME where the instances have been abused to the point of destroying the fabric of the game, that game is DAoC.

The technology may be solid, but in that post Mark Jacobs wasn’t commenting the underlying technology supporting the instances, but their use, abuse and purpose in the game. He was commenting the game design. The same game design that is, honestly, undefendable considering the really poor results that those choices brought.

When “Catacombs” (the expansion that introduced the instances) was in development I presented my worries clearly. I didn’t have *any* direct information, and the game was still in closed beta. But those doubts relvealed to be correct.

Not only I was correct but also “optimist”. The situation revealed to be much worse than what I expected. Not only “Catacombs” made the old world deserted (the same world that the new players can access). But it also sucked out the little life the PvE had left. I was expecting the content to be at least good but not only it wasn’t, it was also subpar compared to what the game already had and that the designers decided to replace.

The work on “Catacombs”, beside developing the instancing technology itself, was about reskinning and remodel the dungeon tiles, reskinning and remodel the mosters and assemble/shuffle the two as a bunch of corridors with a row of glassy-eyed mobs in the middle. There is no “content” here, but just a big, gaping hole of nothing. There isn’t anything to offer, any value if not the biggest experience bonus in the game to speed up the treadmill to the maximum level.

No journey. Just reward.

The PvE wasn’t being enhanced, revised and reorganized as it needed, the PvE was being COMPLETELY REMOVED. The part of DAoC that the most needed some “added value” saw the little that was left completely squeezed out to only leave an empty corpse. A remain. “Catacombs” didn’t just move *all* the players inside the instanced zones, leaving the non-instanced world deserted as I was expecting. “Catacombs” OBLITERATED the PvE (the journey) from DAoC:

Amber:
DAoC is no longer a PvE game. You grind task dungeons until you can do battlegrounds, then you do battlegrounds until you max RPs, then you grind for the next battleground. Rinse, repeat until 50. You can mix it up a bit with your Champion and epic quests, but otherwise it’s TD-BG to 50 now.

You can of course buck this trend, but just try getting a group. To say that the original lands are deserted now is an understatement. There are giants in Cornwall who are at this very moment collecting pensions. You can probably kill them by whacking their walkers with a staff. On the downside their loot drops may not be so interesting. Last one I killed dropped a piece of hard candy, a magnifying glass, half a pack of Pal Malls and a Life Alert bracelet.

The real problem is all in a misinterpretation. All in wrong design assumptions that always plagued this game.

The problem wasn’t about the treadmill being too long or slow. The problem was (and still is) that the PvE experience has very little to offer. Very little value. Mythic needed to blow life in. Not suck it out.

Simply put: a problem of quality, not a problem of quantity.

Dave Rickey:
I wouldn’t say that a complete abandonment of PvE would be a good idea for any game. Very few MMO players want to PvP *all* the time, non-stop, and I think this is why totally PvP games like WW2O or Planetside have limited appeal. Many like it as a sideline, to greater or lesser degrees. And most of those want the ability to say “I am *not* getting ganked today, I’ll just whack mobs.”

But when you have a long treadmill, most of your PvE content is just filler. If it wasn’t intended as such, it will be after the 100th time the players see it. If you have only a certain amount of manpower to devote to building content, and you need a lot of filler to satisfy the demands of the treadmill, then you’re going to have to produce less *good*, interesting, novel content, and you’re going to use up the attractiveness of what you build through sheer player fatigue.

So I would say that what I would be a proponent of would be shorter treadmills, more use of AI-based content creation tools for the filler, and where content is being hand-built that content is high-quality, well thought out, and highly polished.

DAoC needs badly its PvE side. It cannot do without it as it cannot do with it but without value.

Even if the PvE has always been the weakest point of the game, this shouldn’t mean that it should be pushed out of relevancy. This is a terrible mistake that Mythic is paying way more than what they paid with the design mistakes in ToA (which remains Mythic’s most ambitious and most clueless expansion ever).

The PvE is the first consistent part that is presented to new and returning players and fundamental for their “education” through the game. Yes, now it’s possible to move directly toward the PvP. But it’s not possible to expect this to be always viable. The PvE is required as a training ground and to add some depth and consistence to the game. To create bonds and significance. Only then you can expect the players to slowly approach the PvP. It’s a transition and it is the main duty of the game to drive the players along this transition. Gradually.

The most important point is that this part must be fun. It must be reiterated till it isn’t proven fun. Till some true value isn’t found. If the PvE “sucks” the answer is not “Okay, so we’ll get rid of it”. The answer is to ask more questions. Go find out what didn’t work, what is missing, where are the limitations. What are the elements that need to be changed to find that quality.

Is this possible with the resources Mythic currently has?

Shild says DAoC “has no legs” and I agree. From the exodus of players that started one year before WoW and exploded with its release, the game lost around a 40% of its worldwide subscribers. The game is still solid and I’m sure it can still continue to be profitable for a reasonable amount of time. But does it have anything anymore to say in the genre? My answer is still the same: A WHOLE LOT.

Imho, Camelot has always had and still has a huge potential. Not if in the hands of another company, not with a bigger founding, not with brand new, fancy technology. But with the resources they already have available but that they aren’t using at best.

RIGHT NOW an expansion is being designed. For DAoC this is the most crucial moment of the year. But it’s also years that DAoC throws away these possibilities to just slide some more into the oblivion. The game needs to stand up. To revive the interest. This doesn’t mean that it should change abruptly its direction. I like THIS game and I think it has still a lot of potential undisclosed. Adding some more items and a couple of new zones following a pattern that has been consolidated along the years isn’t anymore appropriate. It may be vaguely interesting for the same players the game already has. But it doesn’t add quality, nor it would draw the attention of possible new players. It only translates the game horizontally but without enriching it.

DAoC lacks design. This is the biggest and longstanding problem in every expansion and patch. At their origin. In every step that seems going forward but that goes instead backwards, or aside. Content is being developed and pushed into irrelevancy continuously. The artists have proven to be able to do not just a “good work” but the *best* work, the technology is solid (even if the client is still subpar). DAoC has all the requisites to be able to compete with the latest mmorpgs and stand among and *above* them instead of feeling like a rusty remnant of an old generation.

But it lacks design. It lacks vision, it lack a long term plan, it lack ambition and it lack enthusiasm. It lacks the will to fight its battle.

It lacks verve, drive. It lacks some healthy arrogance to impose itself again on the market as something that cannot be dismissed too easily.

It lacks that “you’ll see”. Anticipation and complicity.

It needs to be streamlined and reorganized to draw the best from its parts. Because the design “wandered around” without a direction. Just following the wind of the last hour. The last trend of the competition. The latest misunderstanding with the players.

DAoC started to lose its verve around the time Dave Rickey left. No, it’s not because the “old times” look always better. Nor because I’m in love with Dave. But because the atmosphere was much different. Way more vibrant and dynamic, more involved. You KNOW I’m right. There was at that time the will to push the boundaries. Right now there’s instead the need to retract to fit slightly better within the shrinking borders.

It’s not the situation that changed and that I’m criticizing: it’s the mindset.

(and I still left out a bunch of notes. I’ll have to go back to some of these arguments)

This was a discussion a year and a few months ago. The subject is “Catacombs”, an expansion for DAoC that at that time was still in closed beta, and how it would have affected the rest of game:

HRose:
My first fear is that now the rest of the old PvE world is basically useless. More desolation for the game, useless space and wasted content. This to push the “brand new shiney”. With higher exp bonuses and the like.

Another “plug in” in the game to pensionate old, obsolete content that will still lay around as a “memorial”.

Or the comic sense of the title and the double symbol of above/below <-> old/new: The real “catacomb” is the old world on the surface, as a cumbersome and inconvenient symbol of decadence.

Instead of adding something, this expansion seems to replace, leaving around the remains of the past (above, instead of below). Nothing new, just more of the same as a “flat” expansion. Hopefully a bit more polished and playable but still “replacing” instead of “enriching”.

Walt Yarbrough:
I look forward to your additional commentary when you have actually played the expansion.

HRose:
Hint: Walt was being sarcastic because I’m “reviewing” the exp without having played it even for a second.

You choose. Or I’m longsighted or I’m a moron :)

This is nowadays:

DAoC is no longer a PvE game. You grind task dungeons until you can do battlegrounds, then you do battlegrounds until you max RPs, then you grind for the next battleground. Rinse, repeat until 50. You can mix it up a bit with your Champion and epic quests, but otherwise it’s TD-BG to 50 now.

You can of course buck this trend, but just try getting a group. To say that the original lands are deserted now is an understatement. There are giants in Cornwall who are at this very moment collecting pensions. You can probably kill them by whacking their walkers with a staff. On the downside their loot drops may not be so interesting. Last one I killed dropped a piece of hard candy, a magnifying glass, half a pack of Pal Malls and a Life Alert bracelet.

It seems I was longsighted (and optimist).

I’ll return on this.

Today I find on Q23 a thread about EA buying Mythic. I was already aware of this rumor but I decided not to write about it because after a brief research I found out it was completely unfounded.

Then I find there a link to Corpnews. Odd. Why write about something like that if there’s no reason?

Maybe it’s because of the change of pace. With Lum’s gone Mythic may become a target once again? :) [insert here Coke-like conspiracy theories]

Beside this, and despite the rumor was dismissed, some trustworthy posters on the boards (Pop on Corpnews and Alan Dunkin on Q23) still confirm that there may be parts of truth.

We’ll have to see. For now I cannot undersand which part may be true and if it may be on relevant level or not. I usually try to read between the lines but, for now, I see nothing. Maybe about raising funds while maintaining control?

On the other side, I tend to believe Lum when he says he decided to move mostly because of his family.

Am I too naive?

MJ: Even if it was true, I couldn’t comment. So, no comment from me today.

MJ: I learned a long time ago that if I start commenting on rumors (true, false or somewhere in between), nothing good can come of it.

Freakazoid: The plot thickens. I can hear hrose shitting his pants in delight from here.

As I finished patching the test client I found a new poll, I didn’t notice it mentioned on the Herald. Odd:

Let’s see:
– “New lands to explore” – No, the world is already deserted as it is. No need for more wasted space when 95% of the content is unused or has lost its role in the game.
– “New dungeons and boss monsters” – No, see above. Even the dungeons are completely deserted or unused. Or devoid of an actual purpose.
– “New races” – Well, at least this wouldn’t be a game-breaking point as those above. I don’t really feel the need for this, though. Maybe new and more unique animations would be better to justify more lag. New models too since the meshes on the heads are still looking awful (or bugged).
– “New classes” – Oh my god, please no. The opposite: consolidate the specializations into full-featured classes.
– “More ways to earn Realm Points” – Yes, falling from the sky. No, really. This one was stupid.
– “More BattleGrounds” – Yeah, because they aren’t already deserted enough. We need more empty space to waste.
– “More areas to fight in RvR” – Who the hell wrote this poll? Has he ever played this game?
– “More abilities to use in RvR” – It depends.

This is poll was stupid. I hope DAoC can offer more that wasted space and new classes that will take years to fit and balance. The game’s possibilities are REALLY not limited to that. It’s really deluding to see devs asking for ideas that are solely limited to “more of the same” fluff when the possibilities are instead *infinite*. This game has so much more to say. Something that ADDS and complements what’s there already. Not just pointless extensions of the same. Noone wants the game even more stretched than how it is already if there isn’t solid DESIGN below. Ideas with a purpose and a role in the game. Not just excuses to keep the dev team busy.

It’s time that this game goes to untap more its own potential and use better its resources. Adding more worthless content as it happened for the past expansions isn’t going to be useful for everyone, in particular when there are other games that can offer that type of mudflated content with greater polish and depth. In fact DAoC would definitely need a reorganization, not another stretch when the fabric of the game is already thin and vulnerable. I’d hate to see those resources wasted even more on a type of development that doesn’t fit this game.

I also do not think that this form of demagogy through polls is going to help the game. The players, massively polled like that, erasing the level of the discussion, cannot suggest new ideas. DAoC needs to move onward. Not backwards. You cannot continue to copy a model that worked in the past in the hope that it can still work today. The game needs a direction, not a “return”. This game has already wasted too much dev work to develop content that noone is using.

Learn from Eve-Online (which hit 95k of subscribers and not far from surpassing DAoC’s peak of contemporary users worldwide). Or rehire Dave Rickey.

Now about the patch. Thls last “fragment” is less interesting than the previous because it’s reserved more to the “bugfixing”, tweaking and completing the work started with the previous patches than adding meat. Since the changes are minimal, in particular about the classes, I won’t comment them. There isn’t anything deep that depends on design. These just depend on a careful balance that is possible only through lots of testing. It can only come after the design.

Other notes that are more relevant are about the fix to one bug that was one of the hugest gripes of the community in the last months:

– Line of sight issues have been improved for all towers in New Frontiers. This fix also addresses many of the ‘cast through walls’ issues that Bainshees had on towers.

Oddly enough I didn’t see anyone celebrating. This is one fix that should be worth the whole patch after all the complaints from the players. It’s between the best changes on this patch.

Then the gravestones (that the players leave to litter the place as they die) received a graphic restyle. I logged in to see these because I always appreciate when the game is reworked and refined. But in this case I didn’t like them. They are bigger and the white marble makes them too intrusive. They look too much “kitsch”. I wish the artists didn’t change the style because now they are really ugly to see around. The old version was much less disturbing and more similar to stones, making them fit well with the environment instead of clashing with it. But then who will you ever find that goes on a lenghty commentary about gravestones in a game?

And finally a card game. I went to check this one too. Of course I wish a card game had actually, you know, cards. With artwork and everything. Instead, but as expected, the card game is just about a dialogue with an NPC. You buy a “token” (1 gold) and then use it to select three cards/options from three decks. The first deck has three cards, the other two are bigger. You win prizes depending on how many cards you “match” for each deck. The prizes range from fluff (“roleplay” items you can equip like mugs or flowers) to various types of currency (gold and the coins used by the merchants in Catacombs and Darkness Falls). And even respec stones (I’m not sure about this one).

This patch also adds a timeout for inactive characters at the border keeps that will affect the buffbots. They said that this change was intended to reduce the lag but I don’t see the difference if these buffbots sit at the destination keeps instead of at the border ones. It is more coherent, though, since it forces the players to move them out of a “secure” space and into keeps that can be attacked.

I also don’t see how this system can actually affect someone in the practice since it triggers after 30 minutes and then gives a warning for another 15 minutes. Plenty of time (45 mins) to move the buffbot a little to circumvent the timeout. You also usually need a rebuff way more often than that.

There are many other smaller changes aimed to complete the work that started with the previous patch fragments.

Overall the patch is good but also feels near completition. Many players rant because the class changes didn’t meet the expectations. As I commented in the previous occasions the class changes in this patch differ from those in the previous one about the “heavy tanks” and came more in the form of tweaks and adjustments than new gameplay patterns that add or transform the game. I didn’t comment these exactly because they were more a result of a balancing work that is always redundant more than a result of design.

So I’m not surprised if the players expected some more, in particular if you consider that these changes arrive after very long periods, and after your class is examined it will take a huge amount of time till you’ll see more changes (since the number of classes to examine is so high).

What “Class Changes and Cross Cluster Guilds and Alliances”. This is “Prettier Cotswold” patch! REJOICE!

Mythic is pushing out patches on the test server at an incredible speed, so the week isn’t ended that we have already the third part just two days after the previous.

Most of this patch focuses on more class changes to the assassins and some adjustements to the previous changes to the hybrids. I noticed they moved the proc heal styles to the enhancement line instead of the healing one, solving at least one of the problems I pointed since the other line usually doesn’t have a lots of points into it, making those skills too weak to be worth the space they take on the quickbar and still not enough to justify a respec. I won’t comment further the other class changes and fixes because I don’t find useful to try to explain those changes if I cannot offer worthwhile comments. I just don’t know the classes well enough and instead of gathering some superficial comments I decided to just shut up. I’m also having an high degree of frustration writing here in the wider context and not being able to say anything incisive (I’m at loss about this site for some reason. I cannot gather my thoughts, I find hard to explain things and even writing a few lines is a pain and takes me too long).

All the changes appear to be solid, though, and make sense.

On the other side there were many changes behind the scenes to the recent overhaul of the starting villages. Some of my complaints in the other post were solved and running around the village to check all the minor changes made me remember how much I love this game and how much I’d like to see it more popular, successful and evolving. In fact the main reason why I hate to write about the class changes it’s because I always feel that six months from now we’ll still be at the starting point. You seem to never achieve anything and most of the class redesign are circular movements. You never make a step forward, it’s all redundancy.

Instead the little things and fixes, the graphic updates, the reorganization of a zone, streamlining the newbie experience, enhancements to the UI, client and controls… All these are small, always understimated changes that instead always go in a positive direction. They are always definite improvements without the gain/loss scenario of the class changes where you always gain some and lose some as if you can never achieve anything satisfying and are stuck permanently in a sort of “meh” status.

Running around Cotswold makes me content and I wish that these types of enhancement would never stop. The place is so cozy and pretty now. They added “pathway” textures to lead to the various places and this alone makes the zone so much better. The newbie Darkness Falls dungeon now has a path leading to it, even if it’s still located outside the town. It’s still hard to spot but I changed my mind on the critics I made. The orientation of the cave entrance, away from the village instead of facing it, is good after all because more coherent with the sense of story. You move out of the village to find a place that doesn’t belong to it like if it was just another building or the entrance to SI. They added a new NPC that is easy to spot. It gives a funny quest (ooh, “spin the elixir”) that will drive a new player naturally inside the dungeon. So this NPC along with the new pathways on the ground will do a very good work to direct the players without making them feel lost. I truly approve these changes :)

These pathways added really add a new dimension to the game. No, I’m not crazy. This is the major difference between how the great zones in WoW are compared to those bland and dull in DAoC. In WoW each place is planned and modeled to have its own identity. You can take a screenshot and I’m able to recognize the exact spot. These zones build a seamless world with its own consistence and this is one of the things that WoW did better. In DAoC, instead, the zones are usually flat and featureless. There’s “terrain” but there aren’t really “places”. Pretty much all of the starting zones are about a mix of hills and plains bundled together just as a “space”. A “case”. It’s a box for the players to move within, but it doesn’t really have environments or “places”. There’s the grass, the hill and the trees, mixed together at random and failing at creating an immersive environment. It’s only a simulation of an environment without an actual content that gives it a quality.

The pathways instead are a perfect example of that dimension that DAoC missed. It was enough to add a few textures to create paths and some wood fences here and there that the game space acquired some direction and personality. It’s hard to explain in words what I mean but it’s enough to look at the new path that now connects Camelot with the housing zones that you easily understand what a big difference it makes (Mythic, consider this while developing the zones for Warhammer, these are the important “details”). See how the trees now border and follow the road instead of just being scattered randomly? See how this is already enought to bring some life to the place? It’s not anymore just a space connecting two points (the capital and the housing zones), but an environment with its own consistency. It’s not anymore “filler” space (see how it looked before) with a bunch of hills and trees distributed randomly, instead it becomes an handcrafted environment that has something to offer. A quality that gives a new dimension to game space. Making it interesting and helping the players relating to it (both for the immersion and to not feel lost in the continuity of the randomness of trees and hills). The terrain cannot remain just terrain as a space to hold something. It must be modelled and created. Shaped so that it can acquire its own quality that adds to the rest of the game. The terrain isn’t just a functional backdrop, it’s the fabric of the world. And that world need consistence and value already on its own.

Beside the paths I think they added some more objects inside the houses and slightly tweaked the lightmaps (they look more consistent now even if still not perfect). About the lightmaps: I hate DAoC’s engine but one thing that it does wonderfully is the rendering of the lights and colors (Morrowind is the same). I would really suggest this truly revolutionary idea. Why not get rid of the faked player torches in the game so that you could build an environment without having to tune it for both possibilities? This could even join another idea I suggested a while ago. This is another of those innate qualities of the game that could really be better used. Removing the player torches as a triggerable, artificial light could make all the zones and dungeons much more immersive and good-looking. As a compromise between a place too dark and one too bright, so that the colors would *really* come to life. Adding then dynamic, colored lights to all spells and effects (like the glowing weapons) would transition the game into a visual MASTERPIECE. Of course this isn’t a simple task and would probably require a huge work on the programming side, but then you could take advantage of the Warhammer fork to justify this work and integrate it with both games. It would be really an unique feature that no other game will be able to mirror in a long time.

Finishing the comments about the latest changes to the new starting village layout: I think they added a new tree type that looks nice and adds some variety and it’s now possible to see outside the buildings through real windows. New players now spawn in the world near their class trainer instead of inside an empty house (as I ranted about in the comments to the previous patch), and the Shrouded Isles portal has now a new look. It looks better in fact and, as I said above, contributes along with all the other tweaks and changes (pathways again!) to make the village so pretty and welcoming. If you try to log in the old version after getting used to the new changes the difference seems rather big.

I so love it! You did a great work Mythic.

(I collected some more screenshots)

P.S.
Make some of the emotes reset if the player moves. /worship while moving looks just too silly.

I just finished to comment the latest patch notes from DAoC that a new one arrived on the test server. And no, I won’t follow Sanya’s “suggestion” (Read, Test, THEN Post) :)

I pretty much confirm the comments on the previous notes, the patch looks solid and well thought. I could go nitpicking but overall they are doing a good work.

The most relevant changes are about the classes, as expected, with another MUCH NEEDED change to the UI so that the effects on the armor and weapons could be actually usable. This last change is one I ranted about for a long time and some of the work already began with the previous patch, even if the system wasn’t finalized.

Before the change in order to use an effect/power on your equipment (think to the usable trinkets in WoW for an example) you had to exit combat, target an enemy, open the inventory, right click on the item with the effect, type “/use” to finally fire the effect and reenter combat to resume your normal attacks. While it was possible to cut some of this “micromanagement” by adding an “/use” macro to a quickbar you can still clearly understand how absolutely broken, unusable and frustrating was this system. I never tolerated it because this is one kind of design that should have NEVER made to a live game.

With the new change they streamlined the whole process and even tweaked a few other elements of the UI. The effects/powers on item can now be used simply by pressing the correspinding icon, as it should have been from the start. I’m not sure about the combat/out of combat thing because I never actually used these powers (I always refused to waste my time on ToA artifacts). Other minor, but appreciated, changes are about the addition of an “info” button to the items mini-window that would open directly the complete ‘delve’ window with the detailed informations. I still think that using three different windows (tooltips, mini-window and ‘delve’ window) to have complete informations on a item or skill or spell is a bit too much and the UI could use a more consistent and radical rework. But at least, even if not perfect, these changes make sense and are serviceable. It’s always better to clearly show buttons than requiring the player to know the keyboard shortcuts. In this case the ‘delve’ window could be opened only by pressing a key.

Beside the UI and minor bugfixes there are the class changes as I said. Here I’m cautious to make comment because I don’t know the classes well enough and I don’t have the competence to comment about the balance.

In the case of the assassin classes (Nightshade, Infiltrator, Shadowblade) the changes are exactly as largely anticipated by the community. They mostly affect their performance Vs caster classes since the most relevant and shared change is the possibility to “destroy” with a stealthed attack the bladeturn defensive spell (and “brittle guard”, a ToA skill) that some casters use. Beside this, the damage of these stealth attacks has been raised “slightly” and the damage of the Shadowblade when using these skills with a 2H weapon increased “significantly”. The “Remedy” skill of the Nightshades was also nerfed but this is tied to more upcoming changes so it’s actually pointless to comment it while it’s still unfinished.

So pretty much what everyone was already expecting, without many surprises or new interesting possibilities.

There were other “minor” tweaks here and there. Some changes to some Master Level skills that I have no clue about and a “nerf” to the Warlocks by making it chain spells on a longer timer (three seconds instead of two). There was also a change for the Bainshees, instroducing fall-off damage the further you move away from its cone spells, which makes sense.

The rest is about the three hybrid classes. Even here it’s easy to group the changes. Friars and Wardens got two new instant spells with a duration of 30 seconds and recasting time of 30 seconds, also. Yeah, it’s odd but it may make sense. Why add an instant spell that, with those recasting and duration timers, can basically remain always on? My guess is to add a degree of “twitch” since using and keeping these spells alive will involve directly the player instead of remaining a passive effect to cast only in preparation of a battle. The second reason was coming from a misunderstanding of the mechanic that could actually make a fun idea that I’ll explain below.

These instants give the caster a 15% of possibility, when hitting a target in melee, to heal for a really low value his allies within a radius. There are two versions of this skill, one working within a 1000 unit range (only on the group) and the other within 250 (for every player within the range), but with a bonus on the healing varying from 40% to 20%, depending on the level of the spell.

I always welcome defensive skills because DAoC TRULY needs to slow down the combat and make it more satisfying. So every buff of the defensive skills is always appreciated. In this case I’m kind of sceptical because it happens rarely that Friars have many points on the rejuvenation line and the odds of this spell having an actual relevant impact are very, very low. I’m not even sure if I would bother to use it if I was a Friar.

My suggestion is to give some depth to the system, also following the misunderstanding I had while reading the patch notes. So the idea is about making the change in the way I wrongly assumed it worked. There are two different possibilities:
1- Make the two spells stack together, raise both recasting times to 60 seconds and boost up the healing effect.
2- Do not make the two spells stack, raise both recasting times to 60, and “double” each spell, making each copy stack together but not one with the other (the PBAOE and group heal).

The idea is to give really a “twitch” choice to the caster. Instead of just cycling the spells to keep them alive, the caster has now a tactical choice: use one after the other to have the effect “always on”, or both together to have them stacking, but expiring after 30 seconds without the possibility to “restart” them (due to the 60 seconds recast timer).

In the first case both would have a recasting time of 60 seconds and a duration of 30, so you would need to trigger one and the other only as the first expired to have an “always on” effect. With the alternate possibility (the choice) to use them all at once to have them stack but for a shorter period of time. The second possibility I suggested is a little more complicated but does just the same, it only doubles the spells so that the player could still have the choice to use exclusively one version or the other (PBAOE instead of group heal).

My guess is that in Mythic’s implementation and purposes the skills don’t stack and the player will only have to choose between one or the other. My idea (the first) could be simple enough to implement and offer some more “active gameplay” (the choice to stack the skills together OR use one after the other). So possibly more fun.

All these comments were about the shared changes between Friars and Wardens. Beside these the Friar had its heal over time spell boosted up (both in healing done and double duration) and a self-buff heal proc added.

The Thanes had the casting times progressively lowered and the ranges progressively increased on some offensive spells (bolt, AOE and instant DD) and three spells added. The first is an energy debuff, the second is another energy debuff but castable on its weapon and the third an odd high level energy DD that seems to disarm the caster for 10 seconds (it basically throws its hammer on the target, but working like a ranged spell). Plus some tweaks to the RR5 skill, removing the casting time and making it another instant while nerfing its damage after the first target (it’s a lightning bolt that jumps from a target to another).

This should be everything. As I said at the beginning the changes look good enough even if they don’t really add much to the game. Lots of retooling with the same stuff, lots of mixing, but not much when it comes to add some consistent new systems, so I’m not sure if these changes will actually bring some more *fun* to the game. I think the changes to the heavy classes in the previous patch were more creative and offered more direct gameplay, while what we got for this patch is more in line with the old balance tweaks, offering less occasions to actually enrich the combat system.

Beside this I actually found some time to log in Pendragon to test the newbie stuff I commented in the other entry. I have so-so feeling about it.

As I logged in the game with a new character I was basically dumped into an house from the roof, in Cotswold. Not exactly my idea of “polish”. The house is small and you have an NPC right beside you. You would expect it to give you some newbie informations but the NPC is just passive and it does absolutely nothing. The house is empty beside that NPC. The lightmaps work this time but they aren’t really well done. There’s a fireplace and if you turn off your torch the fire seem just sitting there, in the middle of an absolute darkness and without casting some light itself. So the lighting with the torch on is good, while the lighting with the torch off is broken.

As I exited that house I saw the new layout of the village, which is good. All the buildings now are put at the perimeter of a circle, so it’s better organized, with a new, pretty bindstone in the center. I still wish I had some more indications because again, as a brand new character, there was nothing leading me along the way. I was just dumped in one of the houses with no clue about where to go. Which is very bad for a newbie experience. The trainer for my class (and starting quests) was actually inside one of the buildings. Here the lightmap with the torch on is broken again (the floor is too dark).

I looked around for a while, since I was looking for the Darkness Falls new mini-dungeons. The entrance is actually just by the village but not so easy to find. It’s right behind a building so you have to bump against it to notice and there aren’t any new NPCs leading you there. Plus it looks more like a pile of rocks than an entrance to a dungeon and its entrance is not even facing the village. I don’t think that a new player would find it easily.

All these minor things could use some more work. The player dumped by an NPC who can give some directions, the lightmaps fixed in those few cases and the RvR cave moved in a more visible place, with its entrance facing the village and with some dedicated art so that it actually looks more like a portal than just a clump of rocks.

The dungeon itself is really beautiful since it uses the Darkness Falls art that was redone for the last expansion, even if I think you can see the new art only if you have the expansion. I think the idea is wonderful overall. You won’t hear anymore the players complaining about having to kill rats. In fact the environment is rather intimidating for a new player, even too much.

In this case the lightmaps are really, really well done, both with the torch on and off, but I still have a few critiques to make on different aspects:

– The first is that the dungeon is way too big. Mythic always exaggerates when planning the new zones and here they repeated the mistake once again. It’s not huge, but I would remove at least some of the rooms to make it more streamlined.

– Another change I would suggest is to make the mobs drop some loot instead of just gems to resell to vendors. In the first levels of every game the loot is really important for a new player because it provides incentives to continue to play and explore the game, instead of just focusing on the repetition of the combat (since you basically have no skills to use). So I would work to add more interesting loot tables to ALL the mobs in the dungeon (not just the leet stuff noone will ever kill in a newbie zone) and let the players equip themselves without the need to buy junk from vendors.

– The third suggestion is to add a bind point inside the dungeon so that the players don’t have to zone in/out when they die. This may be a minor point since the entrance is so near to the village but I think it would add to the fun, in particular when these newbie zones are so terribly deserted. You definitely cannot plan them as expecting hundreds of players within.

I also noticed that there’s a deep purple named mob inside. All good, but I would tone it down so that it’s actually doable with not more than four players. It just won’t happen that the dungeon will regularly see more than an handful of players. And I would consider already rare the fact that you aren’t alone. So, for god’s sake, plan the content and the spaces accordingly to the players that use them and not on an arbitrary preconception so distant from the reality. It could have been also interesting to reuse the same art but “recompiled” and rescaled to not just use the same sets of DF. Like a poket version of DF not only in the number of rooms, but even in their scale. Making these dungeons more unique instead of simply reused art (which also kills the variation and the expectations of the players since you play in DF at level 1 in the same way you’ll play in DF at level 49. Guess why DAoC’s PvE is boring?).

It’s still a very good idea since the game would show its best profile right out of the box. With the possibility to get involved in RvR from the first level in the case you happen to find another player lost in there.

So, overall, these newbie changes are very good ideas that could still use a more careful and polished implementation. It’s mostly about tuning and reorganizing what is available more than creating new stuff. Mythic is doing a decent work, but they could improve when it comes to the actualization of these ideas. Too often these things are thrown in without much thought.

Uff. I write endlessly again without saying anything. I also collected a few screenshots that I’ll add here. The new layout in Cotswold and that newbie dungeon. I still love DAoC’s artists, I wish Mythic would use their talent better :)

Mythic is working behind the scenes, away from the spotlights. Pretty much everyone stopped discussing their games, all the attention is now about WoW, the occasional NCSoft exploits and the periodic SOE screwups.

All this seem to have had a positive effect on the game. Some of the original team doesn’t work anymore on DAoC but is shaping up Warhammer. This is also the reason why the “state of the game” letters aren’t anymore written by Mark Jacobs or Matt Firor but shapeshifted into “Producer’s letters” written by Jeff Hickman, who was promoted to that role months ago. They also seem more frequent and straight to the point compared to the old letters that came every six months and were filled with lots of PR fluff and hype.

The last patch in December was a very good one from my point of view and I think was well received by the community (even if I have been out of touch recently, so I may be wrong). The current feeling I have about the development is that things seem way more “paceful” behind the scenes and there’s a more constructive teamwork. Maybe DAoC has lost some of the ambition and push to surprise now that most of the hardcore work is focused on Warhammer but I believe that the new team has done a very good work at prioritizing the issues and steer the game toward a positive, progressive direction.

There isn’t anything that could draw the attention of new customers or amazing features in the work, but all they are doing seems rather solid and well planned. They are working consistently to address some of the most annyoing quirks and problems, making the whole game progressively better. Smaller steps, but with a more constructive attitude, like the tale of the ant and the grasshopper :)

The new patch (1.82) seems to follow this new direction. Build on top of the previous steps and slowly move to address some of the weak points of the game. Right now we have only the notes from the first fragment of this patch since the complete version won’t be pushed on the live servers till the end of February and more notes will be added as they will be finalized. From Sanya’s words:

That patch is scheduled to go live in late February. The patch after that is penciled in for late March or early April. We go to E3 in May, so we can’t usually patch that month. The next patch is penciled in for June.

Why so much interest about the schedule of the next patches? Because the “Class Enhancements” are one of the current main features and the one that gets more interest from the players. Mythic is focusing the work on a few classes for each patch, adding new skills and tweaking the gameplay more radically than what they used to do till now. So the players are mostly interested when “their class” of choice is going to be involved and, since DAoC has so many different classes, the plan will take a while to complete and the great majority of the players will have to wait their turn (and hope the changes are worth this wait).

The previous patch focused on the “heavy tank” classes (Armsman, Warrior and Hero), while this new one scheduled for late February will toy with three hybrids (Friar, Thane and Warden) and three assassins (Infiltrator, Shadowblade and Nightshade). This will bring the total number of class reworked to 9 on a total of 44 classes in the game.

In theory these changes shouldn’t be balanced fixes required to enjoy the game, but more a new round of development to make these classes feel more solid and fun. So the game works and should be already in a good shape to not make the wait too painful. People will never be happy when it comes to the classes and the balance in a PvP game but at least Mythic is working to improve what they think can be improved.

The rest of the patch (the part already revealed) addresses a few other smaller aspects that have actually a pretty large impact. The first is the possibility to finally open guilds and alliances to the players on different servers, which was a much needed fix when you consider that all the servers are now clustered together and that these limits were just annoying barriers for a community that has already its own difficulties due to the ascendancy of WoW.

Another much welcome change is about the mechanics of reactionary styles that I also ranted about somewhere in the previous months (I thought it was on that huge thread on F13 but it seems I’m wrong). I’m so glad that my evade styles should be finally usable. Before the change the speed of my weapon was slower then the time available for a reactionary style to trigger, so these styles simply didn’t exist for me. With the new change the player has three seconds to “react” and the style will register as correct right away, without depending on the speed of the weapon or other odd, unclear factors:

The style does not have to go off during the three second window. The only thing that must happen during the three seconds is you pressing the button.

Fact is that (if it works as expected) this will fix MUCH MORE than what is apparent, because the previous mechanics were really clunky and broken, making most of the styles just not work already in PvE, even less in the chaos of a RvR battle. So this small change is probably going to have a much bigger impact on the mechanics than what most players will expect and it will be interesting to see how things will change.

This is probably the first time that I see Mythic addressing effectively a problem at its core instead of just slapping a bandaid on it, breaking so many other things as a consequence. Instead this new mechanic is more solid, coherent and streamlined and it will fix other quirks in the use of styles. They did a really good work here, making the implementation correspond with good design and finally fixing a fundamental mechanic. I’ll try to find some time to test this to make sure that my expectations are met.

Then we have more bugfixes, some new animations added (another good point. DAoC needs more personality and variations for its generic and reused animations) and a graphic restyle of the Spiritmaster’s pets. All small steps that go in a positive direction, so I don’t have much to criticize.

Plus some tweaks to the newbie experience some of which I didn’t really understand. I’ll note that I really appreciate that Mythic is still trying to polish the game to make it more accessible and I will always support these changes even if most of the players will rant and ask the priority to be put on other parts of the game. But this is also something that Mythic has always done better than everyone else and that I believe is one of their best quality: keep imporving the game on all levels. In the specifics Cotswold (the Albion newbie starting town) and Mularn (Midgard’s one) are getting reorganized as it already happened for Hibernia. And two low level RvR dungeons (up to level 9) are being added to Darkness Falls to introduce new players to PvP.

This last change is the one that I didn’t quite understand because Darkness Falls is usually considered an high level dungeon and you don’t happen to “find” it if you don’t have already a decent knowledge of the game and its mechanics. There’s also the problem that the game has already low level RvR battlegrounds, but they are usually deserted and basically useless in the game. So I suppose that Mythic decided to streamline this part by making it more directly accessible. Probably opening entrances to these two RvR dungeons right by the newbie towns, as opposed to have to travel on the map to reach the border keep where you can port to the battlegrounds. These are all suppositions because the idea didn’t make sense when I first read it.

If my guess is right the idea is a nice one. New players will be able to have a taste of RvR right out of the box and without having to hunt specifically for this possibility, only to find that the battlegrounds are completely deserted. In this case the RvR dungeons will always be useful for some PvE in the case there aren’t other players around.

So the patch is shaping up rather well. The changes seem small but they are going to fix some major problems in the game and will probably have a much stronger impact than how it may appear at a glance. This is also the first part, the patch is supposed to grow and I hope there will be more interesting points beside the already announced work on the classes.

On the Herald a new “Producer’s Letter” appeared, confirming what I already wrote and commented here and what Sanya already anticipated in the Grab Bags.

Nothing in particular to rant about :) They are doing a good work overall.

(and I really have no clue why this took so much space to say nothing at all)