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DAoC To Ameliorate Level Grind With Giveaways
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a 'State Of The Game' statement for PC MMO Dark Age Of Camelot, courtesy developers Mythic Entertainment, explaining that "We want to go even farther [to accommodate casual MMO gamers] and we will do so over the next few weeks." The "Gift of the Realm" system for the MMO is then explained, in which: "At certain time intervals... players will be able to go to their trainer and receive special rewards for their character. These rewards will include a new experience level as well as gold on a weekly basis. These changes are designed to help the casual as well as the new player succeed more quickly in DAoC." Could this be a solution to help reduce the grind in many MMOs? Update: 07/30 16:05 GMT by S : A commenter points to further details in a follow-up post from Mythic's Matt Firor.
Can't they make everybody level 60 with all artifacts and everything to begin with?
Like Carey in "Whose line is it anyway?": "Everybody gets a million points"
Oh, I see, the whole point of the game is to find the stuff and get the experience.
I see.
They're screwed. They are spoiling the children with faster and better toys.
Whatever happened to the days of 1d4 magic missiles?
"Piter, too, is dead."
I wonder if they really will attract any casual players with this? If I were a casual MMOG gamer, it seems to me that a game like World of Warcraft or City of Heroes would offer more for me than any of the other crop out there right now, no matter how much they try to redeem themselves. In the sea of banality that is MMOGs right now, DAOC has exactly nothing to set itself apart from the masses of other MMOGs
I'm funny. If you come see me perform, I will make you laugh.
So you give kids levels faster... ok sure.
But remember this is DAOC, a huge point of the game is RVR combat. Levels are only a small part of the RVR equation. All this is is cutting down a little bit of one treadmill so people can focus on the other treadmill.. oh did we mention the other treadmill involves your greenhorn character getting his ass pounded by over and over again by other players who have more Realm Abilities and all sorts of other goodies that only killing in RVR combat can gain. Sure you got to 50 faster great.. but when your facing that guy who has more Realm Ranks than you do you can guarentee that you'll be taking a trip back to the bind stone asap.
You still have to keep up with the Jones after you "finish" leveling. Full spellcrafted gear, artifacts, realm levels and whatnot.
Unless you are playing on Ghaeris(the coop server) not alot of difference will be there.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
I quit DAOC several months ago. I was a casual player and played about 1 hour per day. I grinded through all 50 levels although most of the time it did not feel like a grind. It took close to 2 years I quit because the high level content like Master Levels took a 5 to 10 hour chunk of time. How could they possibly expect people to sit at a computer for that long a period of time (when not at work :) ).
Even RVR takes a large time commitment. By the time you get a decent group moving my hour was up and the wife was yelling.
I don't think free levels is the answer. But making high level content doable for the casual player is a step in the right direction.
Lou Sir
the only way to truly eliminate the "Level Grind" problem in ANY multiplayer online rpg is to REMOVE LEVELS ENTIRELY.
improving your character should be about skills and abilities, not "levels" that somehow magically give you more hit/spell points or greater damage capability or in some other way generally make your character more powerful than some newbie with practically the same character (like same race, stats, etc). this is the sort of stupidity that leads to a situation where a level 10 warrior class who normally fights with a sword, for some reason decided to fight with a weapon he's never used (staff for example) and yet he can still beat a level 5 who has specialized in using the staff as a weapon, just because that level 10 has more hitpoints or some arbitrarily assigned bonus to his WC just for being level 10. it's stupid. that level 5 should be the one who wins in that sort of situation.
As someone who played the game for two years plus waiting for something else...
Is that it will take 3-6 months of playing - grinding away to reach a point where you can be somewhat even competive wise. (right in time for them to nerf your toon type into oblivion)
7 day free trial! *snicker* you might be able to get into a chibi mini battleground, good luck on finding someone to play with/against.
This from a game whos main drawing point was realm vrs realm combat. Yet they did not bother to address some of the hudge problems in RVR for two and a half years after release!
I hope they really loose alot of memberships to the new games out there. (and investors)
I've been railing against level-based design since DAoC was in beta, and I couldn't agree more with you.
Levels were conceived for use in a Chainmail/D&D-style setting. They were a convenient yardstick for use by a couple geeks sitting at a card table in someone's basement, with a couple miniatures, a book or two, some graph paper, and a handful of D6s. Sure, levels glossed over virtually every technical aspect of character development, but they were a fair enough approximation for a game driven more by the players' creativity than anything else.
These days, we've got CPUs crunching billions of operations per second. Everything's become more precise; games calculate windage on bullets, have locational hit tables, and crunch a a dozen statistics together just to come up with the damage number that used to be decided by rolling a D6. Yet, despite details in actual combat systems, MMO designers haven't moved beyond the most unnecessarily clunky and burdensome concept in RPGs: levels.
It's disheartening, though: I spoke to a friend about the virtues of lateral character growth, such as skill-based advancement and sliding statistic scales, and the first words out of his mouth were along the lines of "you're taking out levels? What would a player do, then?" Leveling has become such a deeply-ingrained concept that it seems no one even questions its relevance anymore. What could you do without levels? You could focus more on enjoying the gameplay than making the treadmill tolerable. You could have dynamic world events, deformable terrain, real-time war fought by actual players with actual consequences... Instead, it seems all that players expect from the MMO genre is to camp progressively larger variants of bats, rats and snakes, essentially ad nauseum, in some quest to get a new piece of loot and move on to the next to repeat the process.
I had an experience like that with WoW... beta was great, for about a month, before it starts feeling like World of EverUltimaAnarchy of Camelot. They're all fundamentally the same game. The genre's hit critical mass; each new MMO is essentially cannibalizing the player base from the ones before it. But instead of taking their cues from the likes of Horizons and Shadowbane, they just keep cranking out more of the same tripe.
Meanwhile, at least I believe, there's a massive untapped audience for MMOs that want to enjoy the gameplay itself, and won't touch the current incarnation of the genre until something dramatically changes. I know I'm one of 'em, and I think players like me fall at both ends of the MMO scale -- the veterans, who simply aren't impressed with the engine upgrades for Meridian 59 these developers keep trying to pass off as new games, and the non-MMO players, who would rather play a game like Starcraft or Tribes, where their skill matters, and there's actual gameplay to be enjoyed.
But these current MMOs? They're nothing but virtual gambling for virtual prizes. I could do that with Poker on my TI-82 back in high school; the only differences are the fancy graphics, and the 'pleasure' of having thousands of people around who could just as well be replaced with bots.