Is Warhammer really DAOC 2.0?

This post is inspired by Keen’s “get out the hatchet” entry about many of his friends quitting WAR, including a founding guild member and friend and his very own brother, Graev. His post is very contructive in my opinion, and I agree with almost all of his points completely.

Here are the major suggestions and obervations he makes:

• Remove the zone control/locking from the game
• Make keep taking meaningful by adding a Darkness Falls type dungeon
• Remove renown and victory gain from T4 scenarios
• Merge the servers and merge them now
• Revamp the PvE in the game
• The Tome of Knowledge is great but we need substance
• Add content to the game!
• Find some way - any way - to make the world have more ‘place’ and less ‘utility’
• The game doesn’t even know what it’s supposed to be at heart

I agree with the last bullet most of all. Back in beta, before I even got in, the main focus of the game was much different than what we have today. I can’t elaborate too much on it because I’m not properly informed on the previous situation, but I do know that ORvR including keeps was NOT the main feature. I believe the previous version had much more emphasis on scenarios and non-objective-driven ORvR. Keeps were added because the majority of testers found the previous incarnation too reliant on instanced RvR and requested that keeps be added to encourage more open-world RvR.

They had an original vision for the game that just didn’t pan out with the players, so they changed it. The result seems to be a bit of a hodgepodge to be honest.

My personal desire for this game was for it to be DAOC 2.0 and a lot of things line up with that on paper, but not so much in practice. My biggest complaints about DAOC were:

• Horrible PvE grind from 1-40 (grinding was the primary method of progression, not quests)
• You could only feasibly progress through PvE and not RvR (this was patched in later but DAOC didn’t have the population to support it)
• Very poor class balance with drastic nerfs and buffs every few months that hugely impacted RvR
• The Trials of Atlantis expansion placed a huge emphasis on PvE, which required players into brutally long and unfun gear/master-level grinding sessions in order to remain competitive

Look at my hate list for DAOC and compare it to Keen’s must fix list for WAR. His list is quite a bit larger, and could be bigger still if I really wanted to get nit-picky and add my own complaints, including bugs, class balance, missing classes/cities (content), lack of dungeons, etc.

I’ve always felt that DAOC was an amazing concept and only needed a few design tweaks to make it appeal to the masses. The trouble is, I think Mark Jacobs wanted to make it a much bigger departure from DAOC than it needed to be and now we’re left with a game that has some totally amazing features and an equally long crappy feature list. Here’s a quote to help support that statement:

Folks,

I loved DF as well. One of my favorite ideas. I can’t imagine though we would want to do it again, would we?

I mean, really, if we could come up with a totally overwhelming, mind-blowing, kewl innovative, next-generation idea, well then, who knows?

Mark

This statement makes me grit my teeth. In a way, I am happy that they don’t want to recycle all the same old ideas, yet, when you have such a hugely requested feature like this that people are practically begging for, what’s the problem - your own pride? I am really hoping he was being sarcastic here. Darkness Falls wasn’t perfect, but with some minor adjustments, I think it would be one of the best features of WAR.

This isn’t me speaking solely from nastalgia here. WAR would benefit hugely from a DF not only as a really fun way to PvE/RvR up our <40 characters and get some sweet gear and fun experiences for our 40 characters, it provides that incentive for people to go out into ORvR and fight for something too.

Let’s face it, Keen’s first and second bullets are spot on. The zone capture mechanic is retarded and we need more reasons to take Keeps in RvR. Why the hell should I be forced to grind out PQs for hours on end to move that bar forward once I already own all the keeps in the zone? I just spoke with some ex-guildies who are on Phoenix Throne and the reason why they can’t seem to lock up T4 zones is because they have TOO MUCH population and that population is too balanced on both sides mixed with a lot of apathy. It’s very discouraging to log on for 4 straight hours and push your campaign forward only to have it stall up because people got lazy when you logged out. If the endgame is city capture and it takes weeks of your side constantly dominating to push past the enemy’s fortresses, that just seems like bad design. Sooner or later you won’t be able to keep it up for a few days or hours and the control will rebalance itself.

The way the current capture/control mechanic is set up, it only benefits a more dominant side, if there is one. If the sides are balanced, there’s no way in hell you’re going to push to your enemy’s city, which means you’ve feasibly given people an unreachable goal and unreachable content for their endgame characters. When people put in several days or weeks worth of effort and don’t get anywhere, they’re going to stop bothering to even try. The benefit of a Darkness Falls is that they would actually get something immediately for all their hard work in capturing all the zone’s keeps.

People want to play a game, not have another day job. I’ve always hated the capture mechanic and you can read my posts back to the days of beta to see that I basically called called this current situation right out of the gate. I’m not saying this to be cocky, just that it was highly predictable and if I could see it happening, why couldn’t the devs? Is it actually “working as intended?”

Anyway, to tie up this post, I think they simply needed to work with the DAOC model, fix up for four major complaints I had about the game, tied it to the Warhammer IP, and people would be drooling all over WAR. Not quitting in droves like they currently are.

I would love to get a current reading on the number of people paying to play WAR right now. Keen’s right: Get out the hatchet and start hacking away at all the crap that is making you lose your subscribers, Mythic.

I want you to be successful and I want to play DAOC 2.0 not some mystery MMO with roots here, there and everywhere, but without a cohesive and successful implementation.