The realm abilities can be a huge factor in who wins a battle. Trust me, you run into a guy who has 10 million realm pts and he’s going to win.
I think my paladin had about 30k realm pts. :?
scrubbed
You can copy your Igraine characters to the test server, can’t you? Probably has low pop, but I think it’s pretty friendly.
I’m ready for a new MMO. I wish City of Heroes was really coming out in March.
Well, the problem I have with Igraine is no one to play with, and pendragon has even fewer people on than Igraine. Of those, I suspect even less are ‘seriously’ interested in playing the game (many just testing different character builds before respecing their main characters). I can’t imagine RVR is very active there, and I can’t imagine it would be easy at all to ever put together any kind of raid of decent size to hit epic dungeons or master level encounters.
I would want to move to a high pop server like lancelot or merlin or percival.
Funny, that it’s called a massively multiplayer game when you log in and can’t find anyone to play with…
Lokust:
Yep, I’ve been a quiet Qt3 lurker for a long, long time. Been following the exploits of many folks here since way back when on c.s.i.p.g.s. I only just decided to come out of lurker-mode, I’m not exactly sure why.
Albion Igraine was a pretty messed up realm, though not as bad as what I heard was going on in Midgard. With very few exceptions, guilds in Albion were mostly looking out for themselves… And some were downright offensive with their cheating and/or exclusivity. In the end I was a member of Wings of Vengeance, but I spent some quality time with The Night’s Watch (which I founded) and Sangreal Knights (John, I used to be a member!).
I went to Shadowbane thinking “At least in SB I won’t be stuck in this manadory-membership uber guild called a 'Realm’with a bunch of jerkwads.” And it was true. I wasn’t. Then I learned that DAoC’s stability was something to be treasured…
I also tried the migration from Igraine to Pendragon at one point, and to be honest, it was fun. There wasn’t much active, large scale RvR on Pendragon then, but when you went out there it was fun. All the pressure of really looking out for ‘Albion’ was off. You had a good time just grouping with random strangers and bashing heads. It won’t give you the full flavour of RvR, but it is fun.
I really hope that good things come from DAoC’s RvR changes. I’ll be keeping an eye out here for kind words, and on the Igraine VN Boards. I’m not sure if I’d go back to Igraine, but I’d definitely consider returning to DAoC for a while if circumstances were right (i.e. WoW or Darkfall aren’t out yet and I’m craving MMORPG action).
/Eph
Lokust, my wife and I have some level 8-10s as well as our mains on Percival/Albion. You should look us up:
Fazim (Reaver, L18)
Clervaux (Friar, L8 or 9)
are my two; my wife has a cabalist at 18 and a mercenary at 9, plus a cleric at 8. I’d be happy to group up if we’re ever on at the same time.
scrubbed
We’re on a various times. My work schedule is wonky (college teaching) so I’m on during the days as well as many evenings. My wife and I are on together some evenings and often on weekends, but we’re Eastern US time zone. I don’t have the patience to do marathon multi-hour sessions much anymore :).
Actually it’s quite possible. 2 days played is the record I’ve heard from 0 - 50.
This never existed in game - the actual cap 60% haste (ie you can get a spell to cast at a max of 40% of it’s delve).
As to people saying the bg’s are more balanced: perhaps for casters. Pure tanks (Hero’s, Warrior’s, Arms) don’t have the easy to access any time stuns and tend to get slaughtered fast. shrug
That’s exactly what happened to a group of friends who started playing again. We were having fun up until the last BG. Once you get past 35 it’s a long stretch until you have hope of experiencing fun RvR again.
I play on the European servers and we dont have Trials of Atlantis yet. However, it would surprise me if this picture isnt similar on the US servers. The “real” rvr scene has changed a lot during the last 7-8 months. Today we see the effects of the Realm Abilities system, spellcrafting and alchemy and buffbots on the game. All of those things work towards the powergamer and have created a huge rift between them and the casual players. When the realm abilities arrived it looked as very cool idea but seeing the effects on rvr when a few players on each server have climbed high in realm ranks and got all the nice abilities I would say that rvr is very unbalanced today. A group of <realm rank 4 players will have a very hard time fighting a group of <realm rank 7 players. Though since I am on the top tier of the list I prefer things to stay as they are.
I play in a rvr guild and we are all high realm rankers today and all have the RA countermeasures for crowd control which reduces mesmerize and root spells to a mere inconvenience rather that a major disadvantage. Our tanks looses the effect in a very brief moment and the assist train in moving down the enemy fast. This is the Dark age of Tankalot rather than a game were all classes are viable. Our easiest enemies are the low realm rankers that come in a larger group as they carry lots of rps in them and die fast due to few realm abilites that makes a difference in a fight. The only real challenge our group have is when we meet enemies of similar realm rank. The rest of the servers players are really just rp cows ready to be farmed. The RAs system also produces a side effect in that there are very few classes in each realm that are wanted in rvr groups. If your melee class dont have access to the RA determination it is deemed a subpar class. Thanes, reavers and other classes that might be fun to play for having lots of tools to play with simply dont stack up against a savage or mercenary since they will spend too much time drooling in a mesmerized condition during battles. In Midgard you dont need much more than healers, shamans, skalds and savages to win over most enemies. There are similar set ups for each realm today.
The crafting skills, spellcrafting and alchemy, provided a means for players to cap all important statistics, skills and resists on their characters as well as putting good charges on weapons and armour. A consequence of that is that very few weapons/armour bits that drop from monsters are deemed good as crafted gear is almost always better. The only reason to use them is lack of gold. So the drops end up being salvaged for metal bars which are made into tinkets and sold back to merchants for gold. A very different situation from the first year of the game.
The game puts a lot of emphasis of buffs to enhance your stats and becoming better at killing etc. This made a lot of competitive players to start a second account where they leveled up a cleric/shaman/druid that are trained specifically to just buff. In game you see a lot of pve soloplayers that run around with a buffbot in their trail and in rvr you seen the teleporting keeps full of those buffbots as they complement the group’s regular buffer. Or they are the property of a stealther. Almost all stealthers seems to have a buffbot and competing without one is a very hard task. The buffbot problem will never be addressed as Mythic today charges you for 2 times the monthly fee to be competitive. Cash is king. :)
Now it do sound like the game is bad after you hit level 50 and to an extent it is. There isnt anything in game that makes rvr good for both the casual player and the powergamer. If I were a casual player I would go to the zones where the powergamer isnt.
Mythic is aware of some of these problems, they are reviewing the Realm Abililties now since they always have used a sledgehammer for making adjustments in game and very rarely seems to make extensive tests of thier creations. At least that is what it looks like from the player perspective, maybe they are performing a social experiment on the gamers. :)
The coming Frontiers might provide areas where the casual player can compete properly, in a sence it would be nice as it is fairly boring to farm them as it is now. But we move up the highscore list thanks to them :)
Looking at the game from a new player’s perspective I doubt I would stay. The /level 20 and 30 command makes the newbie areas very low populated. (If you have a lvl 50 char on your account you can create a lvl 20 or 30 char without the levelgrinding in the newbie areas.) The huge imbalance ingame due to realm abilities makes me wonder how hard it is to climb the ladder without a dedicated group to do it together with. And lastly, there is no hint in the game documentation to say what classes are viable in rvr if you want to compete or that you need two accounts to be able to play a stealther class. I stay with the game for two reasons, first I want to become a realm rank 11 player to beat the game and secondly there isnt much competion. Doac has some of the best interface and interaction routines for combat between monsters and players that can be seen in a MMORPG, somehting I wish other developers would look at more closely. What it do lack is content during the leveling period as well as post level 50. The number of quests are ridiculously low and new areas to explore are few between. And the camping at monster spawnspots is still a silly game function. The rvr model is just regular team deathmatching and it is a shame they havent managed to develop this area more during all these years.
Heh, became a few more words than I expected :)
[quote=“Guido_Jones”]
Actually it’s quite possible. 2 days played is the record I’ve heard from 0 - 50.[/quote]
I guess that’s possible, but an entire guild working multiple groups together and using AOEs to share XP between groups took two weeks of real time to hit 50 when the PvP servers were launched.
Regardless, 2-4 days of played time to hit level 50 isn’t a realistic figure for the average amount of time it takes a player to reach level 50. It’s still something that takes hundreds of hours. Just going from 35-50 will take most players well over 100 hours.
He said it was impossible, I disagreed with that statement. That’s all Mark - I didn’t say it was likely for a casual gamer or anybody else.
scrubbed
It took me 33 days played to get to 50 not to long after release - it’s substantially easier now. The 4 days played mark would be somebody that doesn’t screw around - that hits the good xp spots and stays there, that doesn’t craft, and doesn’t rvr before they’re 50. It’s very very possible.
Somebody hitting 2 days played is being pl’d by pbae groups.
How exactly does one get “power leveled,” or PL’d? Not that I’m necessarily wanting to do that, but I’m curious because I occasionally see people begging to be PL’d in the broadcast channel.
basically you have a higher level player, or higher level group, killing stuff they would normally kill (red/purp to them) and you as a lowbie are just in the group along for the ride. this situation typically gives you the max amount you could possibly receive per kill, ensuring an extremely fast levelling time.
where you see the most is in pbae groups, where 4+ red/purp monsters die simultaneously.
Yeah, I think if you know what you’re doing, have good gear, always have a group to play with, etc., 10 days or 240 hours to get to 50 sounds reasonable.
That’s still far longer than I think these games should take, however. Let me max out a character in 60-80 hours of play and if the game’s good and you have good character variety, I’ll do it several times more with new characters. You’ll get my retention that way. If I play for 60 hours and I feel like I’m not even halfway done, I’ll probably abandon the game.
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Some people want that. That’s sort of what Planetside and Shadowbane are since the level grind in those games is mostly insignificant.
Ideally, you’d want to make a game that offers both PvE and PvP, plus a crafting advancement track as well. The key would be to somehow not tie the PvE to the PvP or the crafting, so if you wanted to skip one part of the game it wouldn’t penalize you severely in the competitive part of the game, the PvP. How something like that would work, if it could even work, I can’t imagine.