Why's DAoC so unpopulated?

Xtromass · December 2006

It isn't such a bad mmo. It has the best pvp ever, loads of new classes and many new races. The game is old and maybe a bit dated, but it should've had many more players than this. I mean, 500 players on the server at primetime?

Anyone got anything to say about this?

elvigy · December 2006

You said it yourself. It's old and a bit dated. Those who've played it have gotten what they want out of it and moved on, new mmorpg players are looking for something a little more modern and those of us who've been around a while but somehow missed it (like me) may try it but are so burned out on the same old same old, we just hang around here asking someone to make all our favorite games fun and magical again.

Maldach · December 2006

Old and a bit dated is pretty much your answer. DAoC is still my favorite MMO so far, but I have no desire to play it anymore. I still think Mythic did the best job of blending PvP and PvE into one game. But, they broke PvP with the PvE grind gear (TOA) and I was never able to enjoy it after that. My old Skald and Warden are still my favorite characters in an MMO. I miss ya lil buddies!!

Greyface · December 2006

It's no so much that DAoC is old - Everquest is older and has retained much of its playerbase. It's that a lot of players (myself included) fled after Trials of Atlantis made PvE raiding a prerequesite for PvP raiding. They've since corrected a lot of the mistakes made in that expansion, but the community has mostly moved on.

newage2 · December 2006

Its the best game I've ever played. I even enjoyed the pve.

Four years of playing it... almost every class to max lvl. Over 11 mill realmpoints etc...

TOA was ok to me, I enjoyed the big as s raids really. The grind to level artifacts turned me off a bit though.

I think making New Frontiers such a big area was a big mistake. The feel of areas being barren, hard to find

someone to fight etc made more and more people leave in a bad circle... Most of us wanted Old Frontiers back,

with all the memories... but we couldn't.

Well, Im really looking forward to the release of Warhammer Online ::::20::

kishe · December 2006

I quit after ToA...I didnt feel like doing 10 hours raids that wasnt even any fun to be competive in pvp.

grimboj · December 2006

I gave up because its tutorial was so short and everyone i asked for help completely ignored me lol.

Unknown · December 2006

Originally posted by Xtromass
It isn't such a bad mmo. It has the best pvp ever, loads of new classes and many new races. The game is old and maybe a bit dated, but it should've had many more players than this. I mean, 500 players on the server at primetime?

Anyone got anything to say about this?

1. DAoC was doing incredible the first year it came out. It was trying to be DIFFERENT from EQ. (and thus EQ2). DAoC did soo well, that EQ stopped posting number of players on their servers. It can even be said that DAoC stopped EQ from peaking past 400k+ accounts. It's intresting PvP is what made it different from EQ, and ALL other mmorpgs the first year it came out.

2. DAoC got carried away, and later became an EQ clone. This was the start of DAoC's demise. It went from being different, to being the same. This would lead to DAoC doing something unheard of in any mmorpg - allowing players to SKIP levels!!??!!!

2b. To this day, DAoC still, still, does not have any features allowing players in PvP to defend their gains while offline. AO is still the only mmorpg that has this, and does it well.

3. DAoC never fully recuperated from it's flubs listed in #2. Then came the onslaught of next generation mmorpgs a few years after DAoC came out .... EQ2, WoW, and many more Tolkien-themed mmorpgs. Add the fact that older mmorpgs also got re-worked, re-vamped, which kept them compeating... UO, EQ, RS etc....
And there you have it. At present time, the Tolkien-themed market is uber-ultra-over saturated. DAoC has easily made enough money to re-coup it's investment. And it is still making enough profit to be in no danger at all of being shut down. If you or anyone likes to play it - then enjoy it! Have fun! Do not worry about how other mmorpgs are doing.

Thinman · December 2006

1. DAoC was doing incredible the first year it came out. It was trying to be DIFFERENT from EQ. (and thus EQ2). DAoC did soo well, that EQ stopped posting number of players on their servers. It can even be said that DAoC stopped EQ from peaking past 400k+ accounts. It's intresting PvP is what made it different from EQ, and ALL other mmorpgs the first year it came out.

2. DAoC got carried away, and later became an EQ clone. This was the start of DAoC's demise. It went from being different, to being the same. This would lead to DAoC doing something unheard of in any mmorpg - allowing players to SKIP levels!!??!!!

2b. To this day, DAoC still, still, does not have any features allowing players in PvP to defend their gains while offline. AO is still the only mmorpg that has this, and does it well.

3. DAoC never fully recuperated from it's flubs listed in #2. Then came the onslaught of next generation mmorpgs a few years after DAoC came out .... EQ2, WoW, and many more Tolkien-themed mmorpgs. Add the fact that older mmorpgs also got re-worked, re-vamped, which kept them compeating... UO, EQ, RS etc....
And there you have it. At present time, the Tolkien-themed market is uber-ultra-over saturated. DAoC has easily made enough money to re-coup it's investment. And it is still making enough profit to be in no danger at all of being shut down. If you or anyone likes to play it - then enjoy it! Have fun! Do not worry about how other mmorpgs are doing.

A couple of other mistakes that were made were that they didn't do anything to keep the populations of each realm on a particular server equal to one another. This led to large imbalances between the realms on every server, leading many people to quit.

There were all kinds of posts on the vault boards asking them to fix this, but nothing was ever put into place.

Also, the /level20 command basically gutted the lower level game; new players had no one to group with, so they stopped playing before hitting 20.

Mythic designed a great, great game, but they managed it poorly in some key ways. Had they managed the growth and development of DAOC properly, it would still be going strong today. It wouldn't be at the peak numbers, but it would still be going strong.

Rayx0r · December 2006

What confuses me about a lot of fading MMO's is their monthly subscriber fee. Im not a marketing genious, but I could assume a game like Dark Age of Camelot has met its projected goal in revenue.. actually I would assume it has exceeded its revenue goal.

now as subscribers are tapering off, it might be a good idea to consider reducing the subscriber rates. Ultima Online also, and the first Everquest. I really think that if some of these classic MMO's dropped their monthly rates below $10 a month they would draw more subscribers, and it definitely wouldnt hurt their revenue earnings.

but im sure the peanut counters would not like that. what looks like a loss of revenue on paper is very hard to prove otherwise until its put into action. and then if it fails, someone has to answer.

but, IMO theres several games out that I would subscribe to and not cancel if it was cheap enough. Granted I may not play them as much as some of my favorites, but it sure as hell would be a nice break from a lot of the current more popular mmos without the more current and popular subscription fee.

Unknown · December 2006

Originally posted by Maldach
Old and a bit dated is pretty much your answer. DAoC is still my favorite MMO so far, but I have no desire to play it anymore. I still think Mythic did the best job of blending PvP and PvE into one game. But, they broke PvP with the PvE grind gear (TOA) and I was never able to enjoy it after that. My old Skald and Warden are still my favorite characters in an MMO. I miss ya lil buddies!!

I am curious, how many people are like this guy and TOA killed the game for you?

Lunar_Knight · December 2006

In theory, you would keep some subscribers by lowering the monthly fee, but as far as revenue was concerned that wouldn't really help matters very much.

If you have 100,000 subscribers paying $ 15 a month thats $ 1,500,000

If, say 5 % of you player base would leave due to subscriber cost issues thats - $ 75,000 in revenue a month

But if you lower your price across the board to, say, $ 12.95 a month; thats - $ 205,000 in revenue a month

(Yes, you might get more subscribers by lower your price, thus increasing your revenue, but not enough to make it worth while.)

So basically, its not a cost effective way for them to do business. Plus lowering the price of a subscripition doesn't do anything for the game and would just be a excuse for them not to create dynamic content or gameplay.

The reason I left DAoC was because it was so hard to be competitive in RvR. I was trying to run a guild, become good enough at Armorcrafting to make myself armor, trying to get things in order to be able to even function decently in RvR and trying to actually have fun with the RvR end game. It was too much effort. ToA killed the game in soooo many ways it's not even funny. RvR was indeed fun, but the lack of a progressive storyline to it made it kind of lack a purpose sometimes.

Still one of the greatest games of all time though. I hope the Arthurian legends gets revisited in an MMORPG some day in the future.

Brainy · December 2006

PVE requirement was a big problem IE TOA. Then making seige warfare instead of competitive pvp, IE new fronteirs expansion. Basically they had some expansions back to back that ruined thier game. Add to that what a previous poster said about class/realm imbalances. You cant have a competitive PVP game last very long with one side having huge advantages. Thier developers were so concerned about adding new graphic expansions that they just left the core of the game to rot. With every new graphics expansions the more buggy and imbalanced the game got.

DAOC was so poorly managed, it almost seems like they tried to ruin thier game. Whoever was giving them thier vision after around year two needs to be shot.

Gameloading · December 2006

Multiple reasons. Primary reason is that its simply outdated, And close to everything the game has been done better by other games in the last couple of years.

Herodes · December 2006

Originally posted by Gameloading
Multiple reasons. Primary reason is that its simply outdated, And close to everything the game has been done better by other games in the last couple of years.

I hope, there will be a game, which does almost everything better in future.
So many classes and races. 3 factions. Fine RvR. Fine stories and so on.

Nothing to play here.

Klazart · December 2006

The PvE expansions killed the game for me. I kind of put up with the first one but when TOA came out there was no way I was going to go back to endless pointless boring PvE grinding just so I could remain competitive in PvP.

Mythic called that completely wrong. They thought if they added in a PvE grind and forced players to take part to stay competitive, everyone would have to buy the expansion and then play for x months extra to get the content in it to stay competitive. People like me just quit when we saw what a pile of CRAP TOA really was. Ever since I've been looking for a game like DAOC to play. Maybe warhammer will come close but with EA involved you can never tell.

nomadian · December 2006

interesting how so many mmorpgs seem to put off their core populations by some changes. Eg. EQ, SWG, DAoC, and also UO. All games of which people mention 'if they hadn't done this change' or that. Some people also cite this with a couple of the games that died which makes you think how well-thought out every change seems to need to be in a mmorpg.

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