Hello everyone, first of all let me warn you that this might be a long post 
. Secondly I would like to congratulate the Phoenix admins on making an awesome server. The hype when the server was announced pre alpha didn´t seem too high so I was very positively surprised when it crushed Uthgard as soon as it went into beta.
Uthgard had a straight up horrible server view in my mind which focused nothing on improving the experience for players but instead tried to keep the nostalgia feeling by changing nothing from 1.65. Clearly that does not bring 2004 or whatever back.
So I would like to make a post about general DAoC mentality and discuss features aswell as things that people seemed to be annoyed about. I´m very into game theory, I play poker professionally for a living and study tons of in-depth game theory optimal play and how human thinking differates from "logical reality". Ive also studied game design on university and blabla.
Before going into deeper stuff where I think many people will either agree or disagree I would like to discuss some very simple features.
Every MMO has a couple of annoying things that you have to do, it´s kind of a part of the game. However when these things become too repetitive it can be quite negative.
- Charges: The charges and buff potion system on phoenix is working great. It seems however that most people would like it if their items had more charges so that they would need to go to the recharger less often. I think doubling the amount of charges on all items would be a good idea.
- SI raids such as galla and so on are a little bit too repetitive at the moment. I would suggest highering the feathers gain slightly and possibly in return you could higher the respawn time of the mobs and bosses to make up for that. However the latter could very easily result in some time zones getting their primetime destroyed when it comes to SI raiding so that could be risky. Noone seems to think that galla raiding is super fun but still people put in several hours each week on these SI raids.
- Find a way to improve solo leveling without improving it too much for the very strong solo characters such as animists. If soloing in general becomes too good then classes that are key classes in the exp groups currently will no longer join pug groups and solo instead. Mainly your goal should be to make sure that the classes who struggle hard to get an exp group should have an easier time leveling.
- Consider increasing the RP reward slightly for killing players with much higher realm rank than yourself to help newer characters.
Now to the big discussion, RvR state of the server.
The change which let people get RvR task credit in all zones was a great change to get the action to spread out a bit, however there is still a lot of work to be done.
It´s very nice to see that casual players have a much higher interest of roaming RvR as an 8 man or smaller here than what is being seen on live these days where almost all casual players will just log on to stick to a zerg BG leader. No matter what features you make, people will still be zerging or finding good fights so that part of the game will always be there for those who want it. The question is more about whether there will be alternative playstyles to the "make sure you bring a bigger army" or not. In other words, which % that will be zerg fights or add fights vs the % that will be group vs group. For that reason you should always aim to motivate people to spread out the action a bit rather than everyone on the server porting over and over again to meet up at the same spot.
Top set groups in DAoC have a history of setting up a zone to fight at and as long as groups dont start dodging eachother they will find a way to get some 8vs8 fights. 8vs8 should not be limited to super serious set groups however, a casual group should be able to find other casual groups to fight in group vs group from time to time otherwise there is no point for a casual group to ever go anywhere else than the most zergy spot.
I´m thinking there needs to be more carrots to spread out the action. One way to do this could be to focus more on the control point system that you made but make it more rewarding to take these control these points. Both for the players who capture a control point and for the realm that wins. However instead of only putting them in one zone you could include some more zones or at least parts of other zones. A realm can still benefit from having a zerg army to take some of these flags but an imobile zerg would lose to the realm that spreads out and captures the points where the zerg is not.
This feature is just an idea of how to spread out the action. Of course the struggle with this solution is to not make it so that the game becomes "capture the point" and peoples view of DAoC realm war gets destroyed.
. Secondly I would like to congratulate the Phoenix admins on making an awesome server. The hype when the server was announced pre alpha didn´t seem too high so I was very positively surprised when it crushed Uthgard as soon as it went into beta. Uthgard had a straight up horrible server view in my mind which focused nothing on improving the experience for players but instead tried to keep the nostalgia feeling by changing nothing from 1.65. Clearly that does not bring 2004 or whatever back.
So I would like to make a post about general DAoC mentality and discuss features aswell as things that people seemed to be annoyed about. I´m very into game theory, I play poker professionally for a living and study tons of in-depth game theory optimal play and how human thinking differates from "logical reality". Ive also studied game design on university and blabla.
Before going into deeper stuff where I think many people will either agree or disagree I would like to discuss some very simple features.
Every MMO has a couple of annoying things that you have to do, it´s kind of a part of the game. However when these things become too repetitive it can be quite negative.
- Charges: The charges and buff potion system on phoenix is working great. It seems however that most people would like it if their items had more charges so that they would need to go to the recharger less often. I think doubling the amount of charges on all items would be a good idea.
- SI raids such as galla and so on are a little bit too repetitive at the moment. I would suggest highering the feathers gain slightly and possibly in return you could higher the respawn time of the mobs and bosses to make up for that. However the latter could very easily result in some time zones getting their primetime destroyed when it comes to SI raiding so that could be risky. Noone seems to think that galla raiding is super fun but still people put in several hours each week on these SI raids.
- Find a way to improve solo leveling without improving it too much for the very strong solo characters such as animists. If soloing in general becomes too good then classes that are key classes in the exp groups currently will no longer join pug groups and solo instead. Mainly your goal should be to make sure that the classes who struggle hard to get an exp group should have an easier time leveling.
- Consider increasing the RP reward slightly for killing players with much higher realm rank than yourself to help newer characters.
Now to the big discussion, RvR state of the server.
The change which let people get RvR task credit in all zones was a great change to get the action to spread out a bit, however there is still a lot of work to be done.
It´s very nice to see that casual players have a much higher interest of roaming RvR as an 8 man or smaller here than what is being seen on live these days where almost all casual players will just log on to stick to a zerg BG leader. No matter what features you make, people will still be zerging or finding good fights so that part of the game will always be there for those who want it. The question is more about whether there will be alternative playstyles to the "make sure you bring a bigger army" or not. In other words, which % that will be zerg fights or add fights vs the % that will be group vs group. For that reason you should always aim to motivate people to spread out the action a bit rather than everyone on the server porting over and over again to meet up at the same spot.
Top set groups in DAoC have a history of setting up a zone to fight at and as long as groups dont start dodging eachother they will find a way to get some 8vs8 fights. 8vs8 should not be limited to super serious set groups however, a casual group should be able to find other casual groups to fight in group vs group from time to time otherwise there is no point for a casual group to ever go anywhere else than the most zergy spot.
I´m thinking there needs to be more carrots to spread out the action. One way to do this could be to focus more on the control point system that you made but make it more rewarding to take these control these points. Both for the players who capture a control point and for the realm that wins. However instead of only putting them in one zone you could include some more zones or at least parts of other zones. A realm can still benefit from having a zerg army to take some of these flags but an imobile zerg would lose to the realm that spreads out and captures the points where the zerg is not.
This feature is just an idea of how to spread out the action. Of course the struggle with this solution is to not make it so that the game becomes "capture the point" and peoples view of DAoC realm war gets destroyed.