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Did ToA make or break the game back in the day?
N64314
Member Posts: 37
Hey guys, I have always wanted to ask this question and now more than ever. I just went back to the game for old times sake to find that almost everyone is on a Classic server. Now I'm all for the nerf on buffs with the "buff range" addition but I was really bummed when I heard there was no ToA on the classic servers and I'll tell you why.
I played DAOC ever seince launch. I loved every second of it and when ToA came out i was psyched to see the new content. I had a 50 infy at the time and was heavily into raiding so ToA was perfect for me. The first time I entered ToA I was awstruck by its majesty. I loved the idea of cities underwater, mythical artifacts, and the Master Levels. The scope of ToA was mindblowing. Almost everything required 50+ people or at least a full group.
Me and my guild hit the ground running. my guildies and I were some of the first people to see the ML encounters and areas. I was one of the first infys ever to get the Golden Spear(mind you this is when only 1 person could recive the artifact per encounter). We also had some of the first ML 10s on the server; myself included.
ToA made DAOC for me.... at first. Until the ToA revamp. Sudenly owning a artifact was no big deal. Now every person in the group/raid who attended the artifact raid got the artifact. All they had to do was go talk to a merchant in town and it was given to them. It pissed me off that all the work me and my guildies did farming artifacts went to waste. Now every1 and their brother had an artifact. Same goes with MLs too. I don't remeber if they really did anything to them but i just remember alot more ML 10s on my server in a short amount of time.
O well I will still remeber the good times me and my guildies had in ToA and the rush that I got when I got my hands on the GS.
But anyways enough story telling. What do you think? Did ToA break DAOC or make it better? I just don't like the idea of Classic servers not having ToA.
Comments
I personally did not enjoy the Trials of Atlantis expansion as you did. Here's why.
When the expansion droped I was level 50 and enjoying my RvR against other people. It was an even playing field except for those people who had more time then I and had amassed more RP's but I can get past that by choosing my battles and outplaying some of the people. This all went out the window when ToA came. Everybody had all these wacky items that outdamaged my masterpiece crafted equipment that was spellcrafted with overcharge and had some of the best procs alchemised onto them.
You could say "well why don't you go and get some ToA stuff too?" and here's why. My guild was comprised of real life friends and we were not that big. We did not have the man power to tackle the large raids nor did we wish to invest the time to level the artifacts. I had already spent quite a long time leveling my character and getting the materials and money to equip him in fine weapons and armor that I didn't want to sit in a camp and continue this process... at least not on that character. I had alts but I seldom played them.
Basically in the end the game was about the RvR to me. It was good before ToA came but then it went down hill. I ended up canceling my subscription for a while untill the Classic servers were put in. At that point I went over to the Classics and never looked back. I liked the idea that Botting was harder to do and there were no items that were morphing people into wolves or undead versions of whatever they were. To me ToA was just unnecessary and I'm pretty sure it's one of the reasons I felt no compulsion to partake in it. Most of my guild mates felt the same way and we played till about 1 year ago when we canceled due to population ... or the lack there of.
No required quests! And if I decide I want to be an assassin-cartographer-dancer-pastry chef who lives only to stalk and kill interior decorators, then that's who I want to be, even if it takes me four years to max all the skills and everyone else thinks I'm freaking nuts. -Madimorga-
I like it and hated it all at once. Looking back now, I would say it was a plus, it was great to finally get on that raid, then finally get the roll for the loot you wanted. Even better was "THE REALM IS UNDER ATTACK, CALL TO ARMS".
Oh oh, what do i do, go on this raid or defend my relam? great times.
When I said i had "time", i meant virtual time, i got no RL "time" for you.
It always came down to defending my realm for me. Everything else always came second. If there was a large alb force moving through the frontier and word got out I'd drop what I was doing, get on my main character and off I go to battle! To me, fighting another live, real person is more stimulating the a pre-programed algorithm. This is why most of my time spent in game was either in a battle ground or out in the frontier.
No required quests! And if I decide I want to be an assassin-cartographer-dancer-pastry chef who lives only to stalk and kill interior decorators, then that's who I want to be, even if it takes me four years to max all the skills and everyone else thinks I'm freaking nuts. -Madimorga-
ToA broke the game for me. I was a die-hard fan until that came out. Initially, I was impressed. The added content was amazing. Once the glaze wore off, the neverending grind of levelling artifacts and MLs wore me down. I utterly dispised the concept once it sunk in how many statues I had to kill to level my egg of youth, etc. I have multiple 50's on multiple accounts on both classic and ToA and went to ToA in early '08 for about 6 months. I had some fun, found the ToA content much more managable now (arty xp for everything including rvr is nice), but in the end I found I really didn't play any differently on ToA vs Classic. The artifacts pretty much got replaced by dragon drops once Mythic changed the loot table for them, so it became a waste to have levelled those arties.
Anyhow, my longest break from DAOC was when I quit 3 months after TOA and when I returned about 6 months after classic came back. When toa released, it should have been in the form it is in now. DAOC should never have become a grind-for-gear game IMO.
I cancelled ToA 3 days after its release. All 3 days my alliance tried to get past the first ML, and we kept running into bugs. I didn't try the game again until NF released. I kept playing for awhile, but as the population continually plummetted the game became less and less fun.
While most veteran players claim they did not like ToA, statisticaly speaking the game increased in population after ToA. This trend continued until about a month or two after Catacombs was released. The true start of DAoC's downfall can be attributed to Catacombs (instancing, extremly op classes that could solo or duo entire groups, various other lame crap). I personaly loved ToA, I did not get any artifacts or ML's for almost a year afterwards. Being from mordred, ToA to me was a new playground to gank people and I personaly spent more time in Stygia Haven then cotswold after ToA.
I loved TOA but being that I tend to either solo a lot or just do small casual groups, I never really got to do much of it.
Like many players, I switched to classics when it came out; my reasons were that I wanted to start fresh alongside everyone else (and get some decent Toon names too).
I think TOA and even WARs PQs are an example of PvE which should have stunned the player base into awed silence; however, it just resulted in a lot of players bitching about it. Even now, DAoC players complain about it (when there have been classic servers for years). My conclusion is that players might ask for high end group PvE but actually what they want is PvE that can be easily done either solo or with a few players that yields really good loot; and despite what everyone says, the vast majority of players are casual, they just don't like to call themselves that.
WAR PQ have in the latest patch been "downgraded" and a nice feature is that you can see on your map with ones need big groups (and those are the ones that give decent loot)
To conclude, I don't think TOA broke the game, the population was moving on to other things; however is did hack off a significant amount of PvP/RvR players (who needed to PvE for the master levels and loots to remain Uber) and it probably made them cancel a bit earlier than they would have.
There were several key things that lead to the destruction of Dark Age of Camelot. The main cause, and this often goes overlooked....
was /level 20.
Oh we all used it, but it really did kill the game. No new players would ever join, because back in the day, the DAoC grind was HARD. Soloing from 1-20 without any idea how to play the game (DAoC had no form of tutorial at all, so if you don't know someone in game, you're up the creek). Store bought items were extremely expensive as well, compared to the money that dropped then. Also, the best part of DAoC was, the RvR, and what level did you have to be before you got there? Level 20. Many people just didn't bother, they wandered around an empty zone for a while, went "this is boring", and never returned.
So new players would join the game, and there were no vets telling them how to play, showing them where to go, or anything of that nature. Now add in buff bots, and this plague spread to the point where the ONLY time you could find a group, even on the populated servers, was at level 40, when the grind was just unbearable, even with a buff bot. No groups, no community, no new players, so DAoC was locked to the numbers it had.
Those numbers began to die off. Now I personally LOVED the ToA expansion. It was great, content wise. The raids were beautifully made, the quests were meaningful, the artifacts were HARD to get, and everything was on a massive scale. It was great PvE content.
HOWEVER, it was PvE content, and should have remained that way. The items in ToA were so unbalanced that it changed the face of RvR. My poor armsman could just NOT compete anymore with casters that could nuke me BETWEEN SWINGS because their cast speed was so high from the ToA items. Casters DOMINATED RvR, and the only shot you had in hell was if you grinded ALL the Master Levels, and decked out in FULL artifact gear. It was a MASSIVE chore, and for a game, who at its core, is supposed to be about the RvR, this SUCKED. THAT is what killed DAoC, and lack of support by Mythic after EA threw money at them.
Darkfall Travelogues!
ToA soiled the game.
The New Frontiers soiled the game.
/20 soiled the game.
But nothing broke the game. Well that's true for me anyway it's still the best mmorpg I've ever played.
(\ /) ?
( . .)
c('')('')
Kind of what he said. I don't think it was ever just 1 thing that killed the game but a combination of smaller things that eventually stacked up to form a problem larger then then it's individual parts.
The /level 20 command was unnecessary if you ask me. Sure I've used it because everybody else did. It wasn't very fun to level in an empty zone that I could skip and go play with the other people.
The New frontiers I didn't outright hate but I didn't like what they did to the RVR aspect of the game. Basically, in the old frontiers if you died it would take a noticeable amount of time to get back to your realm mates and continue the fight. Killing the opposition meant something. You could actually change the tide of battle by thinning their numbers. With the advent of NF that was no longer the case. People could port to keeps in the vicinity and then just run back in short order.
ToA as I've stated above in my prior post took away from the whole RvR atmosphere as well. If they kept the artifacts as PvE only I'd have no problems with it, however they unbalanced the PvP and altered the game in a direction I didn't agree with. One of the reasons I went to the Classic server.
No required quests! And if I decide I want to be an assassin-cartographer-dancer-pastry chef who lives only to stalk and kill interior decorators, then that's who I want to be, even if it takes me four years to max all the skills and everyone else thinks I'm freaking nuts. -Madimorga-
ToA broke the game for me and most everyone. I quit early on when I realised the endless grind was now in motion. I loved pre-ToA because it had a fair pvp playing field, once you had a nice set of player made armor, and a few realm ranks under your belt, gear wasnt the issue in RvR. Your tactics and teamwork were what became key. But once ToA came out and you had to endlessly grind in pve to be able to contend in what was an RvR centric game, it really turned me away. I was an RR6 Paladin, and I gave up shortly after ToA, I just wasnt paying to play a pve game at that point, I wanted to play RvR.
YES! It broke the game. I miss the pre-ToA days.
broke the game tremendously...especially on mordred...rip mordred
TOA was a factor and so was NF but after much contemplation on it I think Catacombs was biggest downfall for DAoC. The inability to ballance and fix bugs but the meat of it I think was that it changed a core element in DAoC. With the ability to farm resources in the instances it made DF pointless. With DF being obsolete there wasn't much point in keeps / towers. No reason for the realm to come to gether and zerg up and go out take them. As much as a lot of people hated the zerg for ruining there 8 man or 1v1 the zerg was the heart of the population.
If you look at DAoC pre TOA-NF-Catacombs you had a ballanced system(not talking class or realm ballances ;p)
You had RvR with meaning Hardcore PvP'rs could level to 50 get a template and be happy. Relics and DF mattered. DF was great xp for lower level players monsters dropped better money and seals to buy armor that was better than RoG drops. The crafters could farm seals to buy items for salvage. DF also had nice raid Bosses etc. you had a ballance PvP'rs Crafters and PvE'rs all depended on one another. TOA on ward chipped away at the ballance.
Edit: I wanted to add the best PvP fun I had was in DF
Eve has a good handle on ballance if the misisons weren't so boaring it would be the perfect game ;p
The only thing WoW is missing is meaningful PvP but it shines so much in every other aspect its easy to overlook for a lot of people because you can still have fun PvP'ing and its meaningful to the extent of getting better armor but it dosnt contribute to controll of a resource so it has no sence of impacting ones realm.
Agreed. While I was impressed with the design of ToA, and enjoyed the PvE, I didn't have the time and effort to put into leveling artifacts and doing MLs. Unfortunately, that left me at a serious disadvantage in RvR and I subsequently quit.
It was the artifacts and armor in ToA. if you didn't take the time to farm these and grind levels. You couldnt compete. I hated the balance before hand and after ToA it just got worst. It already bringing back nightmares =(.
Also the PvE in that game was awsome. I hated raids in ToA but the hole world was fun to explore. There were three sides where it would take like 3 toons to go through all of one realm content after all the expansions. The PvE wasn't easy to solo for most calsses. One mistake and camp you were at owned you. It was insane.
I hated when they add the instant dungeons. It seem to ruin all the other content. Atleast for me. Every group just wanted to hop in a dungeon and grind away. sigh
--
"Any free people have the right to choose how it wants to be govern thats the essence of democracy. It's sad when America has chosen for the stability and consistency of a dictatorship and doing it democratically" -utnow
These three things spoiled the game for me. I managed to keep it fun for a bit longer on Mordred because the effects of TOA in partiicular was late in being felt. But eventrually, it became necessary to do TOA to compete and I left the game.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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