Demands for servers

[Graveen]

Beside of this, you can TP directly to ML x.10 and try the encounter... Recently i tryed with 2 animists (ML10, templated) to ML bosses...

Bah...

Except the ones you need position & items to use (Cetus, Typhoon, Talos - although for Thalos i simply can't put the jewel i bought at the merchants), they are all farmables.

ML10 not being nerfed but you can now grab some stuff through Doppelgangers alongside the frontiers.

On a side note, the real PvE challenges are to seek near the annual campaign / seasonnals events *before* they are nerfed or the tech is found. They introduced a loot chest for avoid loots steal that is not stupid at all. Actually Curse is pretty hard without the tech, and same for mournful king / jack frost.

[Sand]

Yes the teleporting does making doing those easier, one of reasons I could go try ml3.10 with just a friar or my cleric/mana menty duo who would have a harder time getting through all the purple mobs on the way to medusa than they had with Medusa herself. I have mixed feeling about the teleports, on one hand it helps someone rejoin a raid if lost, ld, or late and known to farm some of these myself (cetus for example as I like the cloaks he has) but something was lost other than time in raids just porting around. BTW, you can buy the items needed for things like cetus etc off an npc in the center of havens.

The campaigns and redo of dragons bought some pve elements to game though the campaigns were mostly something they started after I left and only been back for a couple short month stints since so didn't get to them.

TOA was hated by many but they don't realize WHY, they simply think it was people don't want to pve so it needs to be quick and easy when in fact it needs to be not bugs and drudgery.

There were many issues with the initial implementation of TOA some of which were addressed early on but still left a bad taste to some people and many continued to think you had to spend many hours in huge raids to do each of them. The having to complete ml x.1--x.9 before being able to get credit for x.10 so that you had to make sure you had the group ones done before a raid to and god forbid you went ld or something during a raid and missed credit for an encounter. Removing that requirement and adding ability of a raid leader to grant credit alleviated those issues. Also from day 1 very few of the encounters required more than 3 good groups but bugs or not doing the encounter properly could lead to failure of more so it was an attitude of zerg it which is fairly boring and thus drudgery.

I have less of an issue of them adding the ability to purchase arti and ml content through mls to give those that really don't like them an option to avoid them but then also continued to strip away at the content itself which imo is a big fu to pve players who may enjoy that content.

I am sure there are many people, even on RVR servers that actually enjoy pve, just like to do both so they play normal servers rather gaheris.

Funny that Uthgard is able to sustain such a decent population despite them fairly slow EXP rate AND disallow things that make bypassing that easy. I don't think they disallow pling persay but do have stance against buff bots and have measures to combat that. I am avid multi account player so that sort of server is not for me but point is I expect they spend quite a bit of time pveing on there so pve can't be the evil that some seem to think it is.

Ultimately, I believe it comes down to players having choose and fun in whatever they are doing. Much of what makes an mmo fun is the interactions with others. Uthgards no botting and smaller world likely means more grouping.

TOA can be fun if you appreciate the design of the encounters but the nerfs made many of those elements inconsequential in addition meaning less people are needed for them. For example it wasn't just that I could kill Medusa with just a friar it was because other than waiting for her to walk back to me the whole time it was simply wack on her when she did so, little difference to going kill some random purple mob. I did not try sticking her to see if that still caused badness and stayed off to one side but I didn't hug the wall and don't recall having to bother with statues.

[PlanarChaosRvrtwo]

Note 40% of DOL players are EU players and there the players were splitted diffrently here pvp was a huge bigger then coop.

[Sand]

I think most players like doing both pve and rvr. Normal servers offer both so will be bulk of population either way.

Coop servers are a bit of a niche because you can pve on normal servers, the players that are drawn to a coop server are those who don't want to rvr at all and/or like the greater freedom of grouping the different realms with each other.

I started on Gaheris as that is where Wolfman was playing and he got me into the game. I was use to doing things like grouping a cleric with a mentalist, a paly with a shammy that sort of thing. So while I am not a big fan of rvr and suck at it, it is more that element and people that my preference is for the coop server type. Storm is nice in providing that element and rvr.

[PlanarChaosRvrtwo]

Well all i wanted to say is your right but dont forget Eu players are bit diffrent.

[tegstewart]

One of us is comparing apples and oranges, and I'm not sure which one. Is the server pop for Uthgardt shown in Portal the current number of accounts online, or the number that have logged in over a period of time?

Gaheris is a gong show. There are a ton of missing stair bugs stemming from being able to interact with other realms which aren't documented and which the player base has had to find workarounds for experimentally.

As an example, I wanted to buy a thing from the player market. The market search NPC found what I was looking for, but gave me a "you do not have permission to buy from this merchant" error when I tried to buy it. Turns out all of the market search NPCs search all three realms' markets, but can only buy from markets for their realm. So you have to search on one NPC, figure out what realm the item is for sale in, and then go to an NPC for that realm.

Before I got fed up and spammed alliance chat to ask how to fix that, I put in an appeal, which a CSR deleted without contacting me. It's an object lesson in how to drive away customers.

[Sand]

I think confusion here is that I am unaware of any DOL server called Gaheris yet you now seem to be referring to one yet not so now I am confused. When I am talking Gaheris, I am talking actual Mythic/EA/Broadsword servers.

There Gaheris is not a gong show. Like normal servers it has bugs, and some of these will be related to the different ruleset. Similarly for a DOL shard, there will be bugs or things not fully implemented, some of them being specific to ruleset but really don't see a "ton of". I have not run into that specific bug you mentioned. On Gaheris there is no issue with buying items from other realms cms and do believe I have done so through the market explorer as well. On Storm, I buy occasionally from Market explorer and have not seen this issue but not enough to know for sure I have bought from other realms.

So to me it seemed you were comparing bananas to oranges. Different server types and different hosters. I was saying need to compare a live server with a live server or shard with shard. Then your at least comparing apples to oranges.

The population information I showed was a site that shows account activity over time and it was for live servers, not dol servers. It was meant to compare different ruleset populations among the playerbase that willing to spend money on the game.

If you do see a bug on storm you don't use appeal, and no one responds right away, it goes to our bug tracker. Information on submitting bugs is in the server FAQ.

[Gocoooo]

I do play on this server:
Brotherland Reworked for RVR action:)

Here is the link for it:
http://www.dolserver.net/daocportal/server.php?s=409
Not many people come on that server.
I mean I never have played on Uthgard. I have never even heard of free shards
before until I was looking for classic DAoC. When I searched for classic DAoC I think it was Google. I found DAoC Genesis at the time. When it was up and running and had people to help me get on the server.
I created an account and to me DAoC Genesis was not the best classic server at the time.
I thought the graphics were dull and the classes didn't work right half the time.
But then I checked out other servers and went on brotherland server and I was like
this server is cool. Then the GM's took that down. I get upset that it gets shut down sometimes.
To me Brotherland is a true classic server with all the Expansions and classes

[tegstewart]

I'm talking about live Gaheris, and it is absolutely a gong show. There are long standing bugs that Broadsword isn't doing anything about. Huge pathing issues, pets ignoring repeated passive and follow/here commands, things like healer pet AI bugging out and just standing there doing nothing, the marketplace thing I mentioned...

DOL is better than live, partly because we have devs like myself who put in the effort and fix the bugs that Broadsword seems content to ignore while also adding new features that DAOC should have had since day one.

[Gocoooo]

I'm talking about live Gaheris, and it is absolutely a gong show. There are long standing bugs that Broadsword isn't doing anything about. Huge pathing issues, pets ignoring repeated passive and follow/here commands, things like healer pet AI bugging out and just standing there doing nothing, the marketplace thing I mentioned...

DOL is better than live, partly because we have devs like myself who put in the effort and fix the bugs that Broadsword seems content to ignore while also adding new features that DAOC should have had since day one.

I agree free shards for DAoC are way better then DAoC live.
When EA signed with Mythic Entertainment. I knew that was the biggest mistake
Mythic Entertainment could ever do. I have no idea why Mythic Entertainment
would ever do that. I haven't played DAoC live in so long.
I will not ever go back to DAoC live

[Sand]

I don't deny live has a many bugs that gone unfixed. I just don't get where coming from to say Gaheris is extra special in this regard and I logged ridiculous amount of time playing there (I have characters on there that had like /played of 30+ days and I was an altaholic). I applaud greatly what DOL has been able to accomplish for what little resources that been available to the project but due to that, for proper functionality it still has a ways to go to compare to live servers even with all the bugs live may have.

I don't play live because I don't like the decisions/direction they have made with game so will not support them by giving them money. I do feel they can also do a damn sight better in addressing bugs but don't find them much worse than most companies and the bugs have generally done little to hurt my enjoyment of the game.

We are really digressing here.

My original point was that the COOP ruleset has a greater attraction than your implying by comparing Gaheris with Uthgard. Having only 14 players is more a testament to how badly live servers population has suffered.

Uthgard has a number of elements that contribute to its success. Here be a few.

Because Uthgard does not need to chase live changes, then bugs get worked out and core functionality nailed down.
Many players long for the nostalgia of old thus there is a draw to the classic ruleset and lives attempt at this was a failure.
PVE is not overly fast so that players do spend the time doing it which helps keeps people invested in their characters and playing.
Player population is a this cyclic thing, if it healthy it can build, if declining it perpetuates that.
The no buffbot rule/mechanism turns me off the server and would many others but many appreciate it so that is attractive to certain elements of the playerbase or at least okay by it due to it helping encouraging group play.

These things on their own do not necessarily a successful make as believe it more overall package they offer and that server is not for all players. I am doubtful a copy of this server would do all that well because most of those who want to play DAoC still are either on live or Uthgard and unlikely to startup elsewhere with the few others playing too sporadically to sustain a healthy server population.

Myself, Storm offers the best of all worlds in that it offers RVR and COOP in the one plus being the "official" DOL server I can expect it to stick around.

I am not your typical player and do see some drawbacks to that but think the lack of population on it and nearly all servers is this game is 15 years old and only had 20k or so players at its peak thus interest in playing the game is low.

Ultimately, I think a purely pve server has as much chance as any server type. One advantage of a pve server is that it can be more easily enjoyed when population is low than content relying on player versus player. Albeit having others to play with does greatly enhance pve play, it just pointless to try and rvr when there is noone to play against. The drawback of a pve server is that you need to keep content up which can be tough, a custom one where people are not expecting all live items and that sort of thing likely have a better shot because players who look to "template" themselves are always looking for specific items and can be hard to keep up on these.

[tegstewart]

I mention Gaheris because I haven't played on a normal live server since before TOA came out. :-p

[Gocoooo]

I mention Gaheris because I haven't played on a normal live server since before TOA came out. :-p

I have two favorite Expansions from DAoC
And they are:
Trials of Atlantis
and Labyrinth of the Minotaur
Even though EA did help Mythic Entertainment
out with the last Expansion

[Harkos]

I do play on this server:
Brotherland Reworked for RVR action:)

Here is the link for it:
http://www.dolserver.net/daocportal/server.php?s=409
Not many people come on that server.
I mean I never have played on Uthgard. I have never even heard of free shards
before until I was looking for classic DAoC. When I searched for classic DAoC I think it was Google. I found DAoC Genesis at the time. When it was up and running and had people to help me get on the server.
I created an account and to me DAoC Genesis was not the best classic server at the time.
I thought the graphics were dull and the classes didn't work right half the time.
But then I checked out other servers and went on brotherland server and I was like
this server is cool. Then the GM's took that down. I get upset that it gets shut down sometimes.
To me Brotherland is a true classic server with all the Expansions and classes

And why? many player on schnitte server at 2 years,then he make allways reset the server. I have 3x mal new leveling my chars and rr and i have no more fun to lvling.

[PlanarChaosRvrtwo]

Well Back to demands:
Every server should offer a curve you can follow by progress developing your char without any big holes.
Every server should offer more then pure hack and slay. (like D2 it also got quests or pvp arena)
Every server should have all principles of daoc working like: craft xp quest and fourth point that can be ether pvp rvr or huge pve encounters.
Every PvP server should offer more then just pvp like mentioned above like in set types tier 1-3 tier 1 free for caps craft it for tier 3 kill encounters in dungeons or something.
Every PvE server should still offer an way to PvP or RvR to incrase attraction for those that live for RvR and PvP so they shoulda ether enable custom things in it or not based upon leaders.
Every RvR or PvP only server need alot of tasks and quest to dont get boring.
And most important rule: Every server should be stable and dont change things if player do things owners dont want. If an player solo an mob that is not meant to solo. Cause its our work to develope but its player work to find ways for something and as long the soloing isnt result of an bug its ok cause players allways find ways to do things you dint recognized. And you dont want alter mobs non stop.
And the last thing: All server shouldnt give extra things for players that give an donation rather then a title.