Some ideas I have for getting more people playing in the frontiers
Upgrade the keep guards so they are really scary. It was like this at the start of daoc when the player characters were much weaker and people weren't as good yet. Then make the keep guards worth realm points. And make defending worth more realm points - even if its an unsuccessful defense. If keeps and outposts are worth a ton of realm points and defending is worth a lot, it will incentivize people to attack them and defend. If the keep guards are buffed to the Moon in strength and worth RP, it will then aid not as good players who are there to defend and can assist the guards when they pop.
Make more doppels and have doppel groups of stronger doppels so that duos and trios/small man can hunt them and have it worth it. And even have places where there is pulls of tough RP giving monsters so people can camp there. Perhaps close to outposts in the generally unused 2 zones of each frontiers. When you have people going out for doppels, then you have others who come to hunt those people, and then that brings defenders out looking for a fight. One way that I would do in addition to the groups of strong doppels is if keep guards were much stronger and worth realm points, then you could hunt the groups of 4 of them that go around. Remember in the event there was purple bosses who spawned and worth a ton of RP, a lot of people were out going for them.
Wandering bad ass monsters/group of monsters that can challenge a group and worth a lot of RP. It also creates an X factor if they happen to add during a big fight. The game needs more randomness. Randomness is one of those things.. too much randomness isn't fun, and too little randomness isn't fun. With too little randomness the better player wins every time, so the not as good player hopelessly loses a few times then logs out.
Something to realize about daoc, it was pve that made the game big. Rvr was a motivating factor to get a 50 and then template them out. But 99% of the gameplay by people was pve. At the start it took about 40 days played for people to get level 50 on their first 50. Down in the dungeons it was scary when your group pulled and instead of 2 oranges and a red, it was 2 reds and a rare purple, that was basically wipe out. And there was scary wandering monsters in the dungeons.
Make more doppels/other RP worth monsters/groups of strong RP worth monsters and put some of those close to outposts. I want to emphasize this. This opens up many possibilities. And wherever you see doppels close to outposts you see action. Think of the action that used to be at the Hib outpost south of Hib maze when there was doppels by there, including one you could long range hit from the outpost. When the doppels were removed from there the action around there went down 90%+. That showed the truth of what generates action.
Make more doppels and have doppel groups of stronger doppels so that duos and trios/small man can hunt them and have it worth it. And even have places where there is pulls of tough RP giving monsters so people can camp there. Perhaps close to outposts in the generally unused 2 zones of each frontiers. When you have people going out for doppels, then you have others who come to hunt those people, and then that brings defenders out looking for a fight. One way that I would do in addition to the groups of strong doppels is if keep guards were much stronger and worth realm points, then you could hunt the groups of 4 of them that go around. Remember in the event there was purple bosses who spawned and worth a ton of RP, a lot of people were out going for them.
Wandering bad ass monsters/group of monsters that can challenge a group and worth a lot of RP. It also creates an X factor if they happen to add during a big fight. The game needs more randomness. Randomness is one of those things.. too much randomness isn't fun, and too little randomness isn't fun. With too little randomness the better player wins every time, so the not as good player hopelessly loses a few times then logs out.
Something to realize about daoc, it was pve that made the game big. Rvr was a motivating factor to get a 50 and then template them out. But 99% of the gameplay by people was pve. At the start it took about 40 days played for people to get level 50 on their first 50. Down in the dungeons it was scary when your group pulled and instead of 2 oranges and a red, it was 2 reds and a rare purple, that was basically wipe out. And there was scary wandering monsters in the dungeons.
Make more doppels/other RP worth monsters/groups of strong RP worth monsters and put some of those close to outposts. I want to emphasize this. This opens up many possibilities. And wherever you see doppels close to outposts you see action. Think of the action that used to be at the Hib outpost south of Hib maze when there was doppels by there, including one you could long range hit from the outpost. When the doppels were removed from there the action around there went down 90%+. That showed the truth of what generates action.
Comments
Dopples and PVE monsters that give RP are a bandaid that's letting people advance characters due to the lack of opponents they can fight. If we had 3000 people on live, there would be no need for any of this.
They really need to log in and look at what the free to play servers have been doing with the game if they want to bring people back. They are not succeeding simply for being f2p.
What happens on new servers is its a fresh start, so people jump in and pve up their characters, thats what they spend most of their time doing, whether gaining levels or going for items for their templates. So there is lots of players spending lots of time playing. Then they get up to level 50 and ML 10 and CL 15 and eventually they get their template. Then they go rvr. But before long the best groups are dominating the rvr and then the population falls off, because you can't beat those groups and if you can't kill them you don't get RP, so you don't advance your character. And people are dissuaded from making alts because they don't want to fight against like rr12 opponents with a low rr character.
There's a market for DAOC out there for sure, but Broadsword doesn't seem to understand how to wrangle it so we see 100x more people playing it elsewhere. To fix population they are going to need to pull in over 1000 players who are happily playing elsewhere, retain them and convince them to sub. I don't see it happening.
They need to fix Endless Conquest being such a toxic model and get some marketing/distribution to get some people, if it's even possible now.
To summarize the additions in my first post..
-making keep guards stronger
-making keep guards worth RP including the packs of 4 keep guards that travel around
-with that making defending keeps worth more RP, possibly points as keep guards are killed
-more doppels including in the currently mainly unused 2 zones in each frontier
-groups of strong doppels or other RP worth monsters so small groups can hunt them
-making some of the doppels/groups of doppels near to outposts so you, so some in group can camp in tower and not get killed all the time by stealthers/gankers
-roaming groups of very strong doppels or other strong mobs that are worth a ton of RP, like the big shot mobs that spawned in the EV event. That had a ton of people out zerging for those.
Live is just not very appealing at moment plus the corruption the groups and bg leaders that seem untouchable it’s just not a fun place to be I’ve been saying this for years but nobody took a blind bit of notice when your in a place where 3 bgs had 500 in each bg on each realm and where devs make your life easier with good programming and control cheats you know you made the right decision sad but true
I can see after branching out a bit that the population just isn't coming back. There's nothing worthwhile to return to other than the same stale Battle Grounds event bandaids trying to cover up the gaping problems with the current subscriber model.
I mean it's nice actually getting to attack players in rvr too instead of the 100000 speed warps that get dropped every fight... but that's a different topic.
World events, Realm Invasions, and things that are a pipe dream to the live devs are all possible and exist, so why cant Broadsword do this? I'm sure < That Place > is just making loot hand over fist to fund development with their Free-to-Play that makes all this possible. Why Can't Broadsword accomplish a fraction of this with their Sub fees?
Pretty much this.
There's a clear gap in development capability which becomes obvious when you look at what BS has done the last decade or so vs what <redacted> has done in much much shorter time (and with no sub fees). Did < I'm not saying >'s developers ask for a big fee or something lol? I read something about they offered to assist live and got threatened legally somehow. In hindsight, this seems like a dumb move from EA/BS considering the overwhelming majority of the player base plays there while the EA/BS version of the game is dying out.
With the live population counts being very very low, I'm starting to think eventually live DAOC is going to die out and operations like < beep > are going to be the future successors. Maybe Live will one day add in bots so whatever whales are propping up the game still have "people" to play with.
It is difficult to view the perceived incompetency as anything but incompetency, especially when compared to what is available elsewhere. However, it may very well be that there is simply a lack of resources dedicated to DAoC on Broadsword's end. Recall, shortly after Broadsword took over DAoC from the defunct EA Mythic, there was a large influx of content into the game. Some of it was received positively while, arguably, the majority was not. Nonetheless, there was active development on their end. This all but halted after Endless Conquest was released which did not have the desired effect: a large influx of new & returning players. Since then, Broadsword changed producers, shelved the alternative server, and focused on recurring events (e.g. Catch Up in Caledonia -- now with PvP, 50 RvR in Battlegrounds, Crossroads Covenant, etc.) all of which are very low-risk development options.
As it stands, Broadsword does not have the creative freedom nor the resources to bring Live out of the dark ages. EA is not known to release or sell IPs of games they acquire. Therefore, the current status quo is likely to persist until the game is no longer self sustainable. The future of DAoC will be the concept, not the game itself. In the interim, I'm LFG for the next PvP event.
Not to ignore the top half of your quote. Thank you for a really good reply. It is this though that makes me think DAOC's future is not on anything "official". I think the game has a good chance to persist after Broadsword's reign ends, but someday the official servers are going to be shuttered when its no longer commercially viable and that's just it.
I came to live servers initially after a 16 year break (no FreeAOC - i always considered these a bad thing) because I wanted some sort of sense that my characters will persist and I'm not wasting my time on things that will just get deleted. I also like the idea of supporting the game and it's future development. 2 years later, I'm a little more worried about live not surviving. Worried enough to make a change anyway that I never thought I would make.
This seems to make a lot of sense. You can take risks and be more creative when you don't have a parent company lording over you. Risks are just that - you might hit it big, you might cause a disaster. They might not even have the liberty to take any sort of risks.
I'd also like to think Broadsword is probably overworked to the max given how many legacy titles they are shepherding at this point.
- I intend to coarsen. I want stark contrasts drawn. I want polarization. I will not quietly accept clown-world so as not to upset anyone. I am not tolerant of our impending and increasing slavery.