Camelot Unchained MMO

The problem with leveling is that it was all taken from PnP systems. The thing with those systems, that a lot of the developers forget, is that they were never really designed for anyone to actually reach max level. Essentially the system is a soft cap system after you hit a certain point (Around level 9 in old D&D)...And the reason this worked is because the ENTIRE game became accessible to you, with a good enough DM, by level 7. You could take down the biggest, meanest, greater wyrm dragon at level 7 if your DM wasn't an asshole--because you often didn't fight creatures like that directly (Puzzles, Gather an army, Quest to get the X other creature to help you, find the magic breath immunity shield ect ect).

The fact was, because of how fluid game play in PnP games was, max level never really became important. That's the key a lot of developers need to look at. If you have level system, then only the first few levels should be "needed" as teaching levels. After that it should become a soft cap system, with progressively higher experience requirements for lower gains. Leveling should ALWAYS be good, but right from the outset, grinding a level shouldn't be better than a piece of gear, or a new item ect. It should just be a bonus in power for time in. This makes it so your leveling comes as a natural byproduct of just playing the game.

Essentially, acquiring new levels should be a lot like getting new gear. BUT gear should be random and levels should be consistent. WoW fucked this all up by combining both of these aspects into the "badge grind". But there is some truth to the gambling/big win aspect of gaming AND there is also some truth that too much frustration burns players out. The key is to allow for both with a soft cap system, and random boss/dungeon loot. If a player walks away with nothing, at least he got some experience. Right now in WoW, all he gets is a badge, which is fine for that "consistent work done" but it diminishes that exciting "big bonus" jackpot effect of winning rare gear (Which, in a soft cap system, great PvE gear would be far rarer).

All in all though, the key is that a level 10, and a level 70 should be able to do a dungeon together in the same way that someone with epics can group with someone with blues. All the level 70 should have is minor advantages in stats, and some other small bonuses (Every X levels should be like a new piece of gear, X becoming larger as you gain more levels.)....So, lets say 10-20 would be about the stat power of an item..But then from 20-40 would be needed for the power of an item...Then 40-80 (And at some point it levels). The trick is to make these levels as something of a "base" reward you get for playing, not something you NEED to actually play.

And I think that's one of WoW's greatest flaws...The fact that ALL of their formula's are based off of level. It makes it so they HAVE to design the game to get to max level as fast as possible. If there was any kind of long leveling process, most of the player base would be completely unable to access any of the content.

Really, developers need to ditch the idea of hard caps...And then, with soft caps, you have tons of avenues opened to you. For example, exp penalties for dying don't make or break the player any longer, they are simply a small sting BUT they are in the players face enough to make them care. Or an experience penalty for changing specs. (And yeah, all this can be accomplished by fixing the economic aspects of a gold/theme park system, where gold becomes useless....But having it tied to a soft level system solves a lot of other problems.)

Grim1_sl said:

That's only on JQ and that happened after Prx moved there. There were some queues before that but the PRX move brought a lot of bandwagoners. Most of the rest of the servers have no queues. The lower tier servers are getting depopulated and have been for a while. The players that don't leave the game go to the top tier servers.

And remember, Queues on JQ use to be 5 hours or more.

That's why our guild moved so much. We kept trying to find a mid tier server that had a medium pop but they all kept losing too many players. Some of us gave up and moved back to JQ.

GW2 is losing concurrent players. You don't want to believe it but it is true.

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Once again.

"We actually hit our base point with GW2 where for a month we saw the same login numbers and every week for the last 5 weeks it has being slowly going up and that is really exciting for us."

I guess they are just lying or something.

I'm done arguing with anecdotal evidence. Not to mention this has got nothing to do with this threads game.

Young_sl said:

It is true that DAOC had some leveling loop holes, but one thing that DAOC did great was encourage group leveling. The max group size was 8, and forming a leveling group was actually quite an advantage. You had consistent pulls with little to no down time, and also safety in numbers from EXP/CON loss deaths. This made dungeons very, very popular and it was common for years after release to see lots of the public dungeons full of groups and solos on a regular basis.

Now if you took the time to commit to a server, like was already said, you could build up some PvE specific characters. And with a few friends you guys could level up alts quite quickly.. especially in the frontier dungeons where there was bonus exp as a reward for risking player encounters.

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What DAOC did well is cater to alts and have a very good roleplaying environment. That said their dungeons were by and large garbage. Heck, their 40+ dungeons weren't even itemized when I leveled through the first time.

I played DAOC from day one. I spent a few weeks leveling my Champion to 50 and another few a year later leveling a Warden. Unlike EQ, where the PVE was the draw I can't remember anyone who played DAOC for their PVE. I can remember their Atlantis PVE focused expansion being a complete bust. I do fondly remember countless forays with groups into the Frontier or doing keep sieges and defenses. Fighting others and realm defense were the draws. The PVE was tolerated because of the bigger picture by and large, but was at best mediocre.

People tolerated the process to get to the endgame generally and play the more entertaining RVR stuff. Removing the grind of the levels for a month in my opinion is a big step in the right direction. DAOC tanked because they tried to move after the EQ PVE crowd, and that wasn't their strengths. I think for this game to succeed, they should simplify and focus on what made DAOC memorable and fun, and it definitely was not sitting in Albion camping and killing trees hour after hour.

Gecko_sl said:

What DAOC did well is cater to alts and have a very good roleplaying environment. That said their dungeons were by and large garbage. Heck, their 40+ dungeons weren't even itemized when I leveled through the first time.

I played DAOC from day one. I spent a few weeks leveling my Champion to 50 and another few a year later leveling a Warden. Unlike EQ, where the PVE was the draw I can't remember anyone who played DAOC for their PVE. I can remember their Atlantis PVE focused expansion being a complete bust. I do fondly remember countless forays with groups into the Frontier or doing keep sieges and defenses. Fighting others and realm defense were the draws. The PVE was tolerated because of the bigger picture by and large, but was at best mediocre.

People tolerated the process to get to the endgame generally and play the more entertaining RVR stuff. Removing the grind of the levels for a month in my opinion is a big step in the right direction. DAOC tanked because they tried to move after the EQ PVE crowd, and that wasn't their strengths. I think for this game to succeed, they should simplify and focus on what made DAOC memorable and fun, and it definitely was not sitting in Albion camping and killing trees hour after hour.

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The thing people hated about ToA was that it added a lot of PvE content to a game that had gotten by on a fairly relaxed leveling system combined with optional dragon/high end world boss raids. There were great items to be had off the dragon, but it wouldn't make or break your template.. you could work around not having it. But when ToA came all of a sudden you needed to have those items or you would be at a serious disadvantage. That was the problem, people didn't want to have to time sink to play. I get that. I played on Mord where the penalty was less severe, artifacts were a lot harder to come by as the slow spawn rates and constant fighting made it very hard for someone to gather the necessary artifact, credit and all three scrolls to activate. Master Levels were also ignored by the mass, some of the larger guilds were able to do them but most smaller guilds just ignored and went along their merry way. You would get up to four so you could drop a speed warp and everyone was happy.

By the time I made it back to a blue server, a lot of people had left the game and it was sad. I understand why they want to try and avoid this, and MJ especially should as ToA was his baby. He knows first hand how bad you can get burned.. so it isn't that I don't understand his angle, I just am skeptic as to if it will be successful. But as I said before, they are measuring success by roughly 50k subscriptions, that is their target self sustainable model. In todays MMO world a free server run by fans can do that, so I don't see them having a large problem. It might be the reverse actually, a large initial influx that inflates the servers, followed by the vacuum as players run for the hills leaving a bunch of deserted wastelands.

Abefroman_sl said:

Once again.

"We actually hit our base point with GW2 where for a month we saw the same login numbers and every week for the last 5 weeks it has being slowly going up and that is really exciting for us."

I guess they are just lying or something.

I'm done arguing with anecdotal evidence. Not to mention this has got nothing to do with this threads game.

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Yes they are lying. JQ has the longest queues at 10 to 30 minutes, they use to have over 5 hour queues. All servers had queues, now only a couple do. Anyone with half a brain can add 1 plus 1 and see that if they were getting more concurrent log ins then queues would be going up, not down. Every server my guild moved to was losing players every week, that's why some of us moved back to JQ. At least the loss isn't as drastic there.

Some servers are so bad off that they literally don't have enough players to trigger a Lion's Arch overflow and have trouble forming groups for FoTM. All of their zones are empty and nobody in WvW, zero players.

The threads about empty servers happen every day. But believe what you want to believe.

And my original point was the the big reason for GW2's losses is a PvE endgame that is just a pale copy of WoW's dailies and instanced dungeon grind. Which is what all the current mmos mistakenly do. PvE endgames that do that all lose players. Except WoW.

mkopec_sl said:

Well PvP and PvE shoud really be 2 different games IMO. Its hard to please both camps in a single game. Inside of a PvP game, levels should be gone, and instead the "leveling game should be all about acquiring skills. Not to make them more powerful, but just a wider array of tools to chose from sort of like a specialization of sorts. I imagine a PvP mmo where a noob just starting out should be able to play right away with the people that have been playing for monts or years and still be able to contribute in a meaningful way, just lacking the specialization tools of the experienced player.

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You just defined the realm ability system. Ignoring the level to 50, a player would start at realm rank 1. As you killed players (and at a later date took keeps/healed/resed/killed realm guards) you gained realm points that pushed you up the realm rank ladder. As you gained new realm ranks, you gained points to spend on realm abilities. These abilities were advantages in the battlefield for PvP and in some cases PvE (such as increase hit points, or a stat, or even Speed of Sound to run from a big boss encounter you were failing). I imagine Mark has a plan to implement a similar if not identical system, from interviews it is clear that Firor will do the same for ESO.

And it is about damn time, it is nice to know that all of your hard work can't be erased by a new gear patch.

Young_sl said:

You just defined the realm ability system. Ignoring the level to 50, a player would start at realm rank 1. As you killed players (and at a later date took keeps/healed/resed/killed realm guards) you gained realm points that pushed you up the realm rank ladder. As you gained new realm ranks, you gained points to spend on realm abilities. These abilities were advantages in the battlefield for PvP and in some cases PvE (such as increase hit points, or a stat, or even Speed of Sound to run from a big boss encounter you were failing). I imagine Mark has a plan to implement a similar if not identical system, from interviews it is clear that Firor will do the same for ESO.

And it is about damn time, it is nice to know that all of your hard work can't be erased by a new gear patch.

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Long they stay away from the hidden levels like they did in war..ie 20 rr =1 level. So level 40 rr100 would be = level 43 A level 40 rr 40 would be = 40..it was these hidden levels that messed up the pvp for lot people. As they would get rickrolled no matter what the temp or class the outcome was predetermined prior to the actual out come.

I do like some of his ideas in the his latest blog about RvR foundation principles but as someone stated earlier, he's definitely bat-shit crazy but that might not be a bad thing.

Not here to start a war either. Different opinions are all good.

Young_sl said:

Really? I thought the stealther chain styles were very complex and were awesome. You could follow up with a bleed against heavy armor, or maybe a armor debuff if you were using a heavier, slower swinging weapon. You could also follow up with additional poisons, snares, casting debuffs etc.. the options were so intense it was just wicked. And I know those styles existed since beta because I was one of the TL's that tested them. Reavers were another really cool class that had a lot of great chain styles with different debuffs or DD's depending on your situation. I really thought that DAoC's melee system was revolutionary in the sense that you actually had to time, position and decide which opening/follow up style was the best for your situation.

Are you talking about PvE or something? You were not landing those chains in PvP unless your opponent were standing still exchanging blows with you. Most of my time in combat were spent chasing a healer, hitting 1 (anytime) with 2 (from behind) as backup.

Most caster classes had debuffs like this, instant Dex/Quick/Str AOE debuffs that were used to interrupt, my Bard also had an AOE instant spell that did nothing but interupt.. most people would spec 1 or 2 into a sub spec to get these types of spells because they were so useful. To me that was just part of the game, positioning and dealing with interrupts. I hate the alternative we see in WOW where if your disable is down someone will chain cast through your damage. These games were better when it was all about the interrupts (See UO if you never played it) instead of disables.

Read what I wrote again. They implemented new debuffs on the test server. Debuffs that cost no mana, had no cooldown, were instant and interrupted casting. You could subsequently lock down any caster class forever if you felt like it. They tested it for several weeks before they decided that it was a bad idea. That's the talent we're talking about here.

Hrmm really? So who did large scale PvP right then? Interested to see what examples you would use from games that did better than DAOC? I was never much into the RvR in DAoC anyway, I played for the 8 man... most of my time was spent on Mordred once it came up.. and the 8v8 was among the best most skilled PvP I have seen in any game. Right up there with pre cast duels in UO.

If a game has decent PvP, those who love PvP will play it, but it doesn't mean it's a great game. Look at people like Tuco who keeps logging into GW2 to WvW. I bet it's not because GW2 is the game where PvP was done right, but because he enjoys killing people with his guild. Or maybe he thinks GW2 is the greatest PvP game ever. What do I know.

I guess it all depends on your play style and experience.. I played DAoC from phase 2 beta up until a few years ago. I had a lot of fun and saw a lot of expansions that people said ruined the game.. but I just never got it. It was always fun for me, so like I said, different people.. different experiences.

I had fun too, but I was a hardcore player who got my fun from things like one shotting players who didn't know better than to pick a theurgist as their main class. Did you have fun playing in your 8 man melee group as an alb? Unless you and your mates were RR7-8+ you weren't going to stand a chance against a good mid or hib melee group. Or what place did a mid or alb caster have in an 8 man group except sorcs? Hell, I spent just as much time waiting for the right classes to log in than I did actually playing at times. If you didn't have the perfect setup you couldn't do anything. On EU servers you had RR10 groups that made 1,000,000 RPs a week off suckers who didn't know better. Skill? Sure, but it wasn't THAT hard to /assist the melee train. Aside from stealthers, only a few selected classes from each realm had any business being in the frontiers because the game was so horribly fucked up when it came to class balance. And they didn't even improve the situation for all the years they worked on the game, but kept making everything worse (savage anyone?). That's not a sign of a good game with talent working for them, but rather the opposite.

Truth is, we'd all be driving trabants if it was the only car on the market, but that doesn't mean it's not a steaming pile of shit.

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I support Abefroman!

Abefroman_sl said:

Once again.

"We actually hit our base point with GW2 where for a month we saw the same login numbers and every week for the last 5 weeks it has being slowly going up and that is really exciting for us."

I guess they are just lying or something.

I'm done arguing with anecdotal evidence. Not to mention this has got nothing to do with this threads game.

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Login numbers mean fuckall. You could have 500,000,000 million people logging in each day, but if each person is logged in an average of 37 seconds, who gives a shit? Concurrent users are what matters and that "same login numbers" shit is just PR spin.

Lithose_sl said:

Leveling should ALWAYS be good, but right from the outset, grinding a level shouldn't be better than a piece of gear, or a new item ect. It should just be a bonus in power for time in. This makes it so your leveling comes as a natural byproduct of just playing the game.

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100% agreed. Diablo 2 and Paragon levels in Diablo 3 are good examples of this. I long for a game that uses leveling as a "backdrop", rather than the core function.

You guys are retarded. GW2 cares about box sales (huge success there) and people buying gems. If people are logging in for 10 seconds on average I would imagine they would be thrilled because that means they are still paying attention to their game enough to load the program. Every time they login they are considering that they could still play this game. That means potential gem sales. Fuck that still means they are a high potential buyer for their next expansion.

Anyway Grim is retarded. He went from:

All of them, even Jade Quarry, has suffered losses in players. Queues for WvW are rare and only on the top tier servers. Queues use to happen on every server.

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to

There were some queues before

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So I mean, your evidence it forum tards complaining and you and your buddies. C'mon bro. Of course there are less people playing at any given time from launch. There are never as many people on at any given time that at a game's launch or game's expansion launch. You're easily going to see a large drop in population and then slowly grow from there.

For fuck sake. I wish my grandfather was Hitler so I could infract you for being dumb.

bigdaw_sl said:

I support Abefroman!

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At least somebody does!

Draegan_sl said:

You guys are retarded. GW2 cares about box sales (huge success there) and people buying gems. If people are logging in for 10 seconds on average I would imagine they would be thrilled because that means they are still paying attention to their game enough to load the program. Every time they login they are considering that they could still play this game. That means potential gem sales. Fuck that still means they are a high potential buyer for their next expansion.

Anyway Grim is retarded. He went from:


to



So I mean, your evidence it forum tards complaining and you and your buddies. C'mon bro. Of course there are less people playing at any given time from launch. There are never as many people on at any given time that at a game's launch or game's expansion launch. You're easily going to see a large drop in population and then slowly grow from there.

For fuck sake. I wish my grandfather was Hitler so I could infract you for being dumb.

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Nice selective editing there fuckwit. I also said they cared about box sales and that was their biggest revenue stream. Their cash shop is an afterthought. Just look at their offerings.

And WoW grew every day after launch, adding servers etc. So did EQ you fucking moron.

Go play on one of the lower tier servers and then get back to me with how successful GW2 is. But you wont because you are a bandwagon retard....

If you want to continue on with the name calling, just keep it up... I can sling it with the best of them and you will lose.


I hope GW2 is successful, I really do. And by box sales alone they are. But FoTM was a huge mistake and it cost them a ton of concurrent log ins. The 5 week increase they tout so heavily in that interview happens to coincide with their holiday event. Even I logged in multiple times for that, I like their holiday events, so do many of their players. But their core PvE endgame is just a pale copy of WoWs and it sucks. As everyone who stopped logging in would tell you but they are too busy playing other games.

LoL of course WoW grew everyday at launch. It only had 240,000 people playing at launch. I don't think comparing servers and they way they are handled in 2004 to 2012 is apples to apples. Adding servers in GW2 has to be done in 3's.

hahah.. that is a real sad try at justifying your losing stance.

Look, I'm a GW2 fanboi, but even I can see reality. GW2 has serious issues that need to be addressed to get back the people who gave up on the game. Otherwise they will be a failure long term. GW1 still is a more successful game if you look at total copies sold, etc. (obviously, that includes expansions). GW2 should surpass that but it hasn't yet. And if they continue to copy WoW's worst transgressions then they wont.

So what this really boils down to is that you are really mad about ascended gear. BTW, I write this sitting in queue in tier fucking 3.

No, I don't care about the gear. The reason people stopped logging in is because GW2's PvE endgame is dailies and instanced dungeons. The very thing ANET said they wouldn't do.

WoW already does that better than anyone else. Why copy it? Especially if you suck at being a WoW clone.

Abefroman_sl said:

So what this really boils down to is that you are really mad about ascended gear. BTW, I write this sitting in queue in tier fucking 3.

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You're sitting in a queue on reset day!? Wow, stop the fucking presses! HUGE EVIDENCE OF THE GAME'S SUCCESS THERE!

I'd like to see Blizzard spout off their "box sales" numbers. Box sales don't mean shit if the "life" of your game is getting bled dry by people logging in for only a few minutes at a time. It doesn't mean it isn't profitable, but it does mean that people probably won't keep coming back.