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#1 Feb 05 2010 at 8:11 AM Rating: Decent
this is my first time in daoc and i really enjoy the look and feel of the game. I was thinking about upgrading to a full account but i was wondering if it is worth it. Often i feel that when i try mmorpgs i am coming in at the end of something great. As my experience with eq and eq 2 have been. At the Same time I really dont like WOW that is why i am looking for alternatives. Anyway if anyone has any feedback feel free to respond
#2 Dec 04 2010 at 2:06 PM Rating: Decent
30 posts
First of all, kudos for giving DAoC a try, even though it's already 8 years in and has lost vast numbers to other more popular, but infinitely more inferior games.

As for your question, that's a harder one to answer. I haven't played DAoC in years myself, so I don't know if you have to pay for a monthly subscription or not. Would upgrading to a full account cost you a lot of money? If so, don't do it. The game is still quite unique and the community will always be amongst the friendliest around, but there are some major problems ahead. For one thing, all the servers are now merged into one main server, which is bad because once that server begins to lose it's population, the game will cease to have a playerbase at all. It's only a matter of time before Mythic shuts it down when the numbers trickle down to a few hundred. Another problem is the actual gameplay itself. When I left there was very little to do at 50 aside from aimless PvP and farming for items. The fantastic raids that used to be led weekly on the dragons or other world bosses have come to an end. I don't know what anyone does for fun, but the raiding and largescale PvP zergs used to be what made the game most entertaining, for me at least.

I feel your frustration, trust me. I have played WoW for 6 years now and it's been a roller coaster of ups and downs, but ultimately it's time to move on. I've also tried other games, though I played Lord of the Rings Online from closed beta to around a year into their live version, but it wasn't quite what I expected. Every other game, Aion being an exception, I've gone into toward the end of the glory days.

And I only just now realized after typing all this how old the original post is. :/ All the same, if you randomly happen to come back and see this, I'd highly recommend signing up for the Rift: Planes of Telara beta. It's the sort of game you want to get into early and it has a draw that many new or upcoming MMOs lack. It has storyline, beautiful landscape and textures, incredible looking gameplay. World of Warcraft is a beast of a game and it'll still be around for a long time, but Rift has the potential to change the standard again for MMOs.

To the admins/mods: I know this was a necropost. I apologize. It was still pretty high up on the first page so I assumed it was an active topic. I tend to forget just how small DAoC's community is now.

Edited, Dec 4th 2010 3:08pm by gravija01
Necro Warning: This post occurred more than thirty days after the prior, and may be a necropost.
#3 Jan 23 2011 at 4:05 AM Rating: Decent
I say do it. I've been playing a year and don't see any end in sight, either for the game or my interest in it.
Necro Warning: This post occurred more than thirty days after the prior, and may be a necropost.
#4 Jul 03 2011 at 6:52 PM Rating: Decent
well, i am in the same situation as you and after getting through the beginners area there are quite a few changes in the game to be aware of. in the training area there are the waypoints, which vanish in the outside lands with a few exceptions I have been told but having done a couple dozen quests none have ever shown so far. Also there was supposed to be a blue symbol thing implemented to show where to finish quests, they don't actually work. You have to interact with certain quest MOB's and THEN it will appear. useless and confusing. Also the map kind of, well, sucks is the kindest word I can think of. Plus it does not seem there are any addons to improve the UI (really really needed, the basic one is clunky and unfriendly). It has it's points however, so try it with those failures in mind...
Necro Warning: This post occurred more than thirty days after the prior, and may be a necropost.
#5 Aug 13 2011 at 1:55 AM Rating: Decent
Actually, many of the issues mentioned above have been fixed. The blue light over NPCs' heads when you have completed a quest with them is working, etc. And Mythic has obviously realized that there has been an influx of new players (there has been -- it's been noticeable; and I don't just mean the EU players, I mean newbs. The new blood of any game.) And has obviously also decided not to let the game die a slow death from neglect, as it was. Take a look. It has been made much more accessible to new players -- not that it will ever be as pick-up-and play as WoW, but I was drawn to DaoC and put up with all the frustrations of the old, unfixed, figure-it-out-for-yourself version -- which often left me tearing my hair out, thinking the game was so maddeningly difficult -- precisely because it was and I say is also the smartest, deepest game out there, the only one that seemed like it would actually prove worth all the hassles of getting up to speed unaided. (And the hassles are much less.) It was sometimes maddeningly hard, but it was never, ever stupid; there is a genius to its design that I don't have space to go into here; suffice it to say I never feared it would ever feel empty; and I would never reach a limit where I had topped out the learning curve and had exhausted all it could teach me.

And what it could teach me was stuff I never expected to learn from a mere game. I am not a MMO player. Because I had never found an MMO that seemed like it would reward the hours and hours one puts into MMOs. Until I found Daoc. And then I didn't realize it was that DaoC was special -- I thought I had just underestimated the genre, so I played DaoC for a while and when I got frustrated, I shopped around. I tried a whole bunch of the best-rated MMOs -- Conan, LotR, Dungeons and Dragons, Runescape, even Everquest II. And others. Inc. Wow. which took me exactly 15 minutes to tire of. (Sorry to any WoW fans; different cups of tea, etc.)

It didn't take me long to realize I am not an MMO player per se; but DaoC is not just an MMO. It was hard; it is less hard now for beginners but it is inexhaustible, really, in how good one can get. And the rewards were commensurate. It is the only game I have ever played that really simulates war. Not set-piece battles, not a pretty fantasy -- war. War I will never know but all human beings are curious about; war that Robert E. Lee spoke of when he said, "It is well it so terrible or we should grow to love it too much." War that my ex-Army Special Forces friend who was wounded to the point he was unwillingly given a medical discharge often cannot bear to remember but more deeply cannot bear to live without. I experienced emotions that I have only read about in war memoirs -- the fear of letting down one's comrades that is greater than the fear of death, and is what is called courage, though it is only one kind of fear trumping another. Battle joy, battle terror, the feeling of fighting three hours straight in mortal terror the whole time -- surrounded by a sea of red -- to hold a crucial keep; and the astonishment of finding three hours have gone by and one is still alive and have somehow held. (Said ex-Army Special Forces friend confirmed that that is as addictive a high in real combat as I felt it; I will remember that afternoon forever. --The day we held Dun Crauchon against half Albion, and I thought I was dead every minute and the hours passed like seconds and then it was silent and the Albs were gone, save for the bodies, and we had held. The astonishment, the bone-deep fatigue, the love of one's fellow defenders, the lasting pride.)

And it is much more newb-friendly now. Mythic has made things that were pointlessly hard comprehensible and learnable, especially for the beginner. But the end-game has not been dumbed down since I have been playing; there is a limit to how dumbed down DaoC can ever be. It simulates war to a degree I would not have thought possible; and war cannot be learned too well, or ever well enough.

So, yes, join. You can quit at any time. But I doubt you will want to.

It is not just a game. I am late-come to gaming, but I know excellence when I see it in any made thing; and DaoC was brilliantly conceived even when frustrating as hell. And it is much less frustrating now; but it has its brilliance still. There will be nay-sayers of course who grew accustomed to it the way it was -- nobody likes change, and players who played from the beginning never knew how hard it was for even bright, enterprising, willing-to-learn newbs to know what they did not know and everyone else did and never thought to teach them. For a long time I was notable for being The Newb That Actually Stayed. Suspect of being an idiot or an masochistic; except by some older players who recognized I had heart and initiative and that the game was just not designed for newbs.

But Mystic is changing that. Because the newbs are coming, and it looks like the game will live; and they will invest in a game with a future as they would not in a game without one, which is what it seemed when it was all slow attrition and no new blood. And they are.

And I have never before written so much as a paragraph trying to persuade someone to try a game before; and I have written a novel here; that tells you something right there.

Edited, Aug 13th 2011 4:13am by jessezam

Edited, Aug 13th 2011 4:15am by jessezam
Necro Warning: This post occurred more than thirty days after the prior, and may be a necropost.
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