Damnit EA give DOAC 2, and would like it by monday!
First MMO for me as well. Was playing Diablo][ regularly with a clan and a bunch of them left for DAOC. Thankfully they kept coming back long enough to convince the rest of us to make the switch. I’ll never forget leaving the Briton starting keep for the first time, watching the sun rise, heading down to the little river in the trees out back, and meeting a Bard. I could hear the music and see the notes playing… it was like I was in a dream. All my geeky D&D fantasies brought to first-person life.
Pellinor\Albion
<The Order of Light>
Punch - crushing Polearmsman
I, too, loved DAoC. It was the first MMO for both Sula and I, and we played it from Oct 2001 to whenever WoW launched. We experimented with the three RP servers but Midgard/Percival was our home and the place where we made some real life friends who we still keep in touch with today.
Metta
Shadowblade of <Rune>, Mid/Perc
I had a lot of fun with DAoC. I remember thinking how cool the spell effects were when it launched – some still cooler than anything since, really. A mini-nuclear bomb effect? Awesome!
I think the three sides, safe areas, and contested wilderness is a solid concept. They really should make a DAoC 2.
you and me both RH. :)
Lariac
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There will never be another game like DAoC for me. The Friar, for all its weirdness (a melee class in armour just above paper?), was designed to scratch that part of my brain that makes me go “squee!”. There was nothing like having some stealther pop out in a Frontier, thinking that I was easy meat wandering around in a robe, and proceeding to whallop the snot out of them, pausing only to heal myself up to full before they released to rub in the pain.
Oh, how I miss that game, and how I’m glad I don’t play it anymore. Too much lost time that I’ll never regret giving up, but probably should…
Dude! Holy unexpected surprises, batman! Great to see ya around.
God, the late-night scheming we used to get up to about relic raids and all manner of mischief. You did a bang-up job managing that alliance. Awesome memories.
Agreed
Being a TL and working with the guys and gals at Mythic is something I’ll always remember fondly.
Double agreed.
There was so much I loved about this game - all the behind the scenes stuff on the pend boards which made me both love and hate the Mythic people (they were all super nice, but a lot of the people in lead positions simply didn’t know how the game worked - resulting in Left Axe, ToA, Shields, etc etc).
My semi-pro gank group that was immortalized in a couple of videos - to me the death of DAoC wasn’t gank groups, it was the release of ToA. Up until that point it seemed that the user base just kept growing and growing, and after that it was just a slow decline.
The Pend boards were awesome. I wasn’t a TL myself, but was able to somehow sneak in anyway. :)
Some of the most fun I’ve ever had playing games was in DAOC. RvR was a blast, especially with a good group or two. I started to lose interest when the ToA expansion came out and added a nasty PvE grind. No MMO since has captured my attention the way DAOC did.
Wow, I miss the Pendragon boards. The best part was that you never needed to read your PMs because Mors would let you know if you got anything important (inside joke).
For some time I had a rule that you could not say ‘slap in the face’ on the Pendragon boards.
I’d do a search, delete any posts containing the phrase, and repost the rule.
DAoC taught me that, as others have noted, players know the game better than the developers. It’s simply a matter of time.
I loved DAoC for a completely meta reason: It was my first real “gaming press” gig. I’d been running a site of my own for some time, and I’d gotten some traction, made a few bucks, but nothing real. Then, someone at Themis pinged me to help them run their brand new DAoC portal at Warcry.com. I started posting things, got into the beta program, and soon after that handed off the reigns to my second-in-command as I’d begun tinkering with the site and managing the main portal for all things Warcry. During my 2 year tenure there, I took the site, kicking and screaming, from 200k impressions a month to over 15 million per month.
Of all the people I met over those years, I think the best among them (and those with whom I’ve solidified the best friendships) have been from that starting group of Mythic people.
There was some egrigious examples in DAoC. Like the lead item dev that thought the 1.5 second casting speed minimum was in place at the ToA launch.
The most fun I had in this game was during beta. I recall playing a Friar and loving the ability to solo, non-stop. Then came the day they announced adding the Bring-a-Friend code into the game, where mobs could no longer be pulled single. I ended up changing to different class just because of that. I really liked the hunter, before they made it so pet dependent, and the Thane.
Did this game never go f2p? Is it still running now, with a subscription model?
Ah, DAOC. Played a lot back when but not enough to be ever hardcore. I mean I was a healer in PvP, that should tell you something. My Computer was so bad I had no idea what was happening during a siege because it was lagging so bad for me all I could do is healspam and hope for the best. I think I never died as often in any other game while still having fun. Sieges where crazy. Not to forget the Relic raid “Road of Honor” where what seemed like the whole realm lined both sides of the road the relic raiders took on their way back with the enemies relic to cheer them on and stop any would be pursuers. Still feel Realm Pride after all these years. Fond memories indeed. I was so disappointed in Warhammer Online as I had hoped they would be able to revive that game play.
Happy Birthday, DAOC. When I first started playing the game in Beta 2, I was just a fan girl. I had no idea that my life would be changed forever. I have lots of fond memories, both as a player and as a developer of the game. A few faves:
Network Outages
When I starting working at Mythic, I got the illustrious graveyard in-game CS shift. 9pm to 6am. I loved it (really!). After about 2am, things normally settled down, and we had a peaceful ride till sunrise. There was a notable block of time (probably a month or so), though, when things weren’t so peachy. At 3am eastern time, on the dot, some sort of network outage would take place. Everyone would drop connection to the servers and their driverless characters would be sacrificed to finlaiths, pygmy goblins, or other horrors. Once the CS crew got their connectivity back, we would hop back on, head to the popular campsites, and start resurrecting people (giving them back their lost XP). We tried to be helpful, seeing how it was happening every night and it wasn’t a problem that either the end user or we could fix. We made a lot of player friends that way!
Names, RP, and the Guilds that Gave Us Grief
I still remember the account name of our most ardent appealer of name violations for the RP servers. I sincerely loved your passion, but the CS tool did not have filters at the time, so it was hard discerning naming appeals from harassment tickets. Man, I was so glad when we got upgraded ;)
Before that happened though, the Lurikeen Uprising and the Kobold Insurrection guilds formed on Guinevere. The massive amounts of Somethingkeen and Whateverbold characters made us alternatively laugh hysterically and scream in frustration due to the appeal queue implosion.
The Darkness Falls Steps
(The porting seems to be common knowledge now, so I guess I can spill some beans)
We had a pretty frequent problem where players would exploit a jumping mechanic to get up the stairs to an enemy’s porting location in Darkness Falls. Generally, they could only get up to first step…the other steps were too high.
I got the chance to address this from a unique angle: I put monitors on the bottom stair. Once you got on the stair, you were teleported back off (I think I put you close to the exit portal, so you had to run back into range of the people you were trying to grief). I distinctly remember some people wanting me to teleport these upstanding citizens to Purgatory instead. For those that do not know, Purgatory is an actual spot in the Darkness Falls dungeon. And, uh, there’s no getting out of there alive.
Other Tidbits:
- Man, I hated that IR gun that Firor talked about. On the rare shift that I had during the day, I got the one day that a delivery truck parked in the spot. Sigh.
- Darkwolves on Merlin/Mordred. Narnar, wherever you are, I have two things to say: “your mom”
- Speaking of Mordred…I got into trouble playing on that server (I loved Mordred). I had to stop playing because I killed way too many people with my Cabalist.
- I loved the Pendragon and team lead community. I miss running encounter tests with you, chatting in IRC, and reading your reports (yes, even the lengthy ones). Serious kudos to the tester community - it’s the only way we could keep sane with the number of classes (and specializations!) DAOC ended up with.
- We had a very informal way of communicating when our dev server was coming down. We designated someone to yell “SERVER COMING DOWN” as he or she walked down the hallways.
- I had a lot of fun helping Aladora make her DAOC player videos. Turned into a lot of critters for her to film and helped her get to places on Pendragon for the primo angles ;)
BardicGoddess
Ahh the Aladora vids. :D those were so good!
BG!!!