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Bhalage #36297 "DAOC commentary:
1. DAOC had an effective overarching system because there were 3 realms. Reasonably good internal balancing.
2. DAOC had good gameplay options because there were no "rails". The developers didn't add over-engineered microgoals here and tokens there to make you do specific things.
Look at how ****** Ilum is -- players want "TOKENS" and **** to drop in Ilum to make it "worthwhile". Players do Warzones only because they give commendation tokens. Everyone and their brother wants *********** tokens as a reason to PvP, instead of simply killing players because it's fun.
In DAOC, you simply got points for doing the one thing common to all PvP: killing *********** players. None of this clicking on chests in Tatooine ********. No retarded medal farming "hey let's stand in the acid pit more". No clicking gimmicky objectives on Alderaan.
You kill players, you get points. Period.
3. DAOC PvP had a greater purpose -- relics that mattered. No game since has implemented an overarching reason for your entire faction to cooperate to WIN THE GAME. Although it has to be said: relics had a significant impact on PvE. And this is probably why we will never see a similar system for WoW/Rift/SWTOR or any PvE-centric game.
4. Gear. DAOC gear, for a very long segment of its life, was easy as **** to get to a competitive level. During vanilla, you did your epic quest, gg. During SI, you talked to a crafter and paid a few hundred gold. During ToA (**** TOA) you ****ed your ******e with a sharp object. After they nerfed TOA, it was a short grind.
Additional note on #2: This is pretty significant IMO, because this may never change for MMOs in the future. Specifically, Mythic was lazy as **** and simply bad at making their "content". They were too haphazard to go and "MAKE RAILS" like Trion, BioWare, Blizzard.
Modern developers sink a lot of development and QA time into creating things like 47 different tokens, finely-tuned token acquisition rates and gear acceleration and titles and rewards and map markers and objective capture times and ... get the picture? Developers nowadays over-engineer the games.
They call it "features" and "content". What it does is force players to min/max their "TOKENS PER HOUR".
Back in DAOC's day, the devs were lazy *****es working out of their garage. Not really, but at that level. PvP in DAOC was barebones and simple: kill players, collect RP. Kill door, kill lord, take keep. Keep helps you kill players, collect RP. Did I mention killing players and collecting RP?
The system was absurdly simple. This means that players are the ones who decided how they wanted to play -- did they want to StealthZerg™? 8-man roam? Zerg that milegate? Camp Darkness Falls? Any of the above, because they all involved ... get this: KILLING PLAYERS, COLLECTING RP.
Nowadays, developers try to tune rewards for zerging, roaming, camping, ganking. If you played Warhammer, you saw this -- keep trading, because players try to optimize RP/hour. Because devs tried to "incentivize" keep warfare. What do we do in Ilum? Trade caps. What do we do in Huttball? Farm medals. We don't PvP anymore, because the developers give us "TOKENS" and micro-objectives, and zone quests.
None of which involve killing players.
Developers are trying too hard at all the wrong things.
Mythic didn't try hard when they made DAOC. They let the players try hard after they lucked out with a solid PvP system.
Sigh. "