I fixed my UI and logged in to look at the situation.

My usual server (Lamorak) is dying so I decided to get on one of my oldest characters on Merlin (a wizard) to see if I was able to do something. This server has always been the most popular and now also on the bigger cluster so I thought it was easier to join a group and do some RvR. I didn’t have any particular expectations, I just wanted to do something and have some fun.

I expected it would take a lot more time to reconfigure the quickbars and get used again to the character but my wizard is still quite limited as I remembered it, so I just needed slots for the two bolts, a direct damage and AOE. That’s pretty much all I can do beside the occasional buffs and situational realm skills like “Purge” or “Mystic Crystal Lore”. But getting used was also the smaller problem.

There were quite a bit of characters moving around the border keep, so I started to look for a group to join. I flagged myself in the LFG window for RvR and broadcasted in both the border keeps “wiz LFG” and even joined the frontier battlegroup (which remained completely silent and realtively deserted for all the time I was there). Well, the result is that I sat there doing nothing for two hours. Not a biggie since I was watching TV (elections in Italy are at the beginning of April and I’m following the debates), I didn’t try so hard to get a group but I still used all the functionalities I had available still with no luck.

After the two hours I was finally able to get in a random group that sat there beside me at least half an hour before inviting me and we waited there another 10+ minutes for a cleric. In the meantime a random Mid player ran in while we were all half AFK and started spamming pbaoe attacks, killing me and some other players before we could even blink. Then the cleric finally arrived and we moved. We took a boat and traveled to the Mid land, lost people in the process, waited for everyone to regroup and reached a Mid tower with the silly idea to try to take it.

We killed a few guards and dropped a ram. A couple of minutes later I see all at the sudden some explosions on myself and I wasn’t even able to turn that I was already hugging the ground dead, with the rest of the group joining me shortly after. We release, other two drop out of the group ranting against Mythic favoring Mid and Hibs and I decide as well that I had enough boredom for the day and quit.

That’s all that happened in two hours and twenty minutes I passed logged in, and I say this because it isn’t exactly a special case, even if not one of the best. Early today I played as well, I was able to find a group relatively quickly and there were 2+ groups chatting and fairly organizing, working to attack one of hibs keep from an alb tower. It was still rather boring but at least we were doing something, killed some guards and threw some fireballs to random target even if I didn’t see any Realm Points. I also passed a bunch of time playing tennis with a trebuched, shooting at the Hib keep wall.

I believe these experiences say a lot about the game and shouldn’t be dismissed. You can even laugh at me and how incompetent I am about the game. In nearly five hours I passed logged in I think I’ve got less than 1k of realm points. But I believe this is instead something that even other players experience and at the end there’s a problem if you log off bored and frustrated. It’s not something that should dismissed and it should be instead examined attentively to figure out if there is a problem, where it is and if it’s possible to mitigate it or even solve it. Or this is what I would do if I had an executive power on the game.

Because what matters is that beside special cases I continue to see a trend in what I have described that remains constant for every day I play, or try to play the game. The RvR moves slowly, the actual fights are less than 10% of the time you spend in the game and nearly always are resolved in a matter of seconds without even giving you the time to figure out what happened, even less to react or plan a strategy. Of course the game is frustrating when you wait so much time for an encounter and then die even before figuring out what happened. The rest of the time is passed reforming, waiting for people, sitting in the keep, repairing stuff or waiting repairs, killing guards and shoot keeps/towers with siege engine, which is another form of rather boring grind when it goes on for a long time with no actual change.

Without trying to polemize too much I believe that the responsibility is half of the players and half of Mythic. I really cannot understand why everyone decides to sit in front of a keep for more than half an hour, I would still prefer to be steamrolled ten times in a row than just sit there doing nothing. There are radical problem in the community, this is sure. It’s not acceptable to have to remain lfg for hours, this is a symptom of a serious problem for a game, in particular for one that promotes and is focused in a social activity like the RvR in DAoC. The more time passes the more the community closes on itself and implodes. No more groups organizing together, but just single groups independent one from the other, completely closed to the outside and extremely specialized.

This is the evolution of DAoC. Smaller, consolidated groups with lot of experience in the game but that only stick to the exact same type of gameplay. Rinse and repeat. Isolated from everything else. This is a community that doesn’t welcome returning veteran players, even less brand new players that may give the game a try. It’s an old, isolated and stagnant community that appears to be able to only lose players and slowly crumble. Inverting this negative trend doesn’t seem possible and in fact Mythic is building the graal of the “new world”, Warhammer, that will magically fix every problem.

The community is just too closed, specialized, used to the consolidated routine. It doesn’t welcome or integrates new players and as it always happen with stagnant water it can only start to smell and slowly dry out. The advantage is that the group of players that are still there is so used to the game that it will hardly leave it. They have their roots in the game, these roots are deep and it is actually surprising how well DAoC is “holding” if you factor all these elements together.

This makes sense if you see what happened with the “classic servers”. They were a success at launch but not as successful as I expected. They address some fundamental problems and, still, the players didn’t accepted them in the long term and they are slowly dribbling out. The idea didn’t “catch” as I expected. Why? I believe as a result of what I wrote above: the community is so self-absorbed, so tight that what drives the game further is not anymore the worth of game itself, but the “habit”. DAoC became the symbol of that immobility. The community inherited and mirrored the identity of the game, it became its face and expression.

The point is that the community isn’t truly responsible and aware of its form. Instead I see this more like a process of adaptation to the game that now reflects it. A mask that shows the exact same features of the face behind. Two levels overlapping. The community carries the “message”, but the message comes from the game. The community only adapted and voiced it. It expresses it, but it wasn’t really responsible of it.

This is why the polls aren’t going to work with DAoC. What the community is expressing runs deeper than that and requires a more attentive observation to really understand what it is going on. It isn’t an easy situation at all because now countering this negative trend would mean try to eraticate and go against a mindset.

So we go back at the last year AGC. What Jeff Hickman says makes sense if you look at it in the perspective of what I said:

For whatever reason, we make a change and it alienates people.

This is true. Particularly true in DAoC, the classic servers are an example. There is nothing wrong in them. They were a brilliant idea, maybe late, but a positive one. The players still didn’t fully accepted it. I believe we could all agree to ascribe the reasons of that “failure” to the fact that DAoC’s consolidated playerbase just didn’t want to leave its ties behind to restart from scratch on a new server and adapt and reform to it. They didn’t accept “change” even if it represented a significant improvement of the game. The game was just less important than what was consolidated, the background of the community.

I always think about what could have happened if the situation was reverted. If the consolidated servers were the classic ones and the new ones were the ToA-enabled. My bet is that it would have been a complete disaster and that wouldn’t be enough players even to keep one server up. To this Mythic reacted fairly well, as they saw that the classic servers were also stagnating, they decided to address the ToA problems directly everywhere instead of nourishing the split (which was always a bad idea. Alternate ruelesets just don’t work).

Now we have a community that is “intolerant” to everything. Good changes, bad changes. Whatever Mythic does is wrong. If Mythic does nothing it’s also wrong. So what? The point is that the community is expressing a discomfort that needs to be interpreted (as my weak attempt here). Really solving the problem isn’t easy at all, again because the real issues are buried deep. Extremely deep, to the point that you are risking a lot if you try to reach them and solve them. And why Mythic should afford this risk? Because it pays back if they do it properly and have the will to do so.

I don’t know. I can just observe and explain my point of view. “Fear change” is something that the community IS expressing, but I don’t believe it’s an absolute rule. It’s just a consequenece of many factors, the consequence of how the game developed along these years.

Mythic already decided to support the game without sudden shifts or revolutions. They understood that the players are still there not for the game itself, but for a nostalgic value and for the consolidated, isolated community that doesn’t accept any intrusion or disruption, even if it is finalized to an improvement. I quoted Lum a million of times when he writes how much more important is the community compared to the game. DAoC is reflecting this. Even the good changes are refused. But Mythic here could make a terrible mistake that is probably going to repeat with Warhammer since it’s independent from the game: the communities are portable. If the people are there for the people and not for the game, they’ll also leave eventually and will never come back. When these solid ties break they cannot be anymore reformed because the returning veterans will always find a cold community that doesn’t recognize and accept them anymore. Again the stagnating water can stay there for a long time, but it can only dry up.

Sadly I’ve learnt how Mythic observes, thinks and acts along these years. I often attacked them because it’s since when Dave Rickey left that they keep stabbing the game, unable to interpret correctly it needs and weeps. I was always there, partly weeping along, partly trying to support it the best I could. I have many ideas about how to invert the negative trend, in particular I think that it needs to pass through a reorganization of the PvE. The community needs to be stimulated again, made active and interested again, not just ranting and passively suffering along. Part of this process would take place outside the game because it’s also there that Mythic killed its community with a lack of involvement and discussion. The non-communication between the parts that brought directly to just too many misunderstandings and incomprehensions. Inverting this trend would be about having a precise plan, not just feeding the players a buch of polls and working on the patches like in a slapfight. The game needs a direction, a “will”. Ideas, discussions. It needs to draw again the interest. Enthusiasm. Creativity. It needs to be reactive, learn quickly, gain dynamism and life.

But then I know this won’t happen. Mythic is betting everything and then more on Warhammer. It’s their way to somewhat wipe the disaffection of the community. It’s a way to negate it happened. It’s a way to avoid to acknowledge the responsibilities and start anew. With the illusion that everything will be different and that they can rise a new DAoC and be praised again. Return at the center of the attention. But the truth is that avoiding those problems means making them even stronger and have them run back over with a stronger intensity. Deeply enrooted problems don’t go away if you look elsewhere and think you can ignore them. They will undermine every new project, no matter how much money you throw at it. No matter of the shiny new brand and virginal community to fool.

What I see, and I wrote many times, is that Mythic is not learning nor able to observe and interpret correctly the needs of their games. They just keep garbling the messages they receive and react inappropriately. It’s a company that was too complacent about their original success and now too arrogant and blind to figure out the next step.

It’s a pity because DAoC deserves much, much, much more. It’s a wonderful game and it’s completely unacceptable to see it sinking as a nicher product than Eve-Online. It has the potential to compete with the best and instead it is moving more and more toward the smaller. It’s like throwing away one of the best games in this genre that still has a lot to say. In particular when Warhammer is exhibiting the exact same mistakes, the same arrogance.

Lum is gone, when he was at Mythic at least I had some faith. He wasn’t there at the wheel but I’m more than sure that he had a very important and positive influence on everyone. I can put my hand on a fire and say that he contributed with far more than some lines of codes on the server, even if his title didn’t attest this. When he was there I still had the small hope that there was someone reading my rants. It meant nothing, of course, but at least I could believe in an implicit, tacit dialogue, agreeing, disagreeing. With him gone I just feel like talking, still a lot, but to a wall.

In short:
– Too much time passed idling or waiting in RvR compared to the actual action that is resolved in a matter of seconds (or less)
– Difficulty to join groups and play the game, hinting that there are deeper problems
– A stagnant, highly specialized community that remains relatively impermeable to both new players and veterans
– The “fear change” expressed by the community is a mask and the expression of a discomfort that needs to be interpreted
– Mythic’s inability to observe and interpret correctly the signs that both the game and the community are sending
– Warhammer, inesorably, will exhibit these problems right from the start, risking another false step
– Lum is gone and took the faith that was left with him