Lands of the Dead vs. Darkness Falls: Don't mess with perfection

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First, a confession: I didn't play Dark Age of Camelot. That being said, I wish they weren't doing this. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing, but when they designed Warhammer Online, they wanted to come up with something new and cool, and I seem to be the only one who thinks they succeeded. I *love* the tier 4 territory control meta-game, the pushing of the battlefronts back and forth to enable and disable various scenarios, to put the capital cities more at risk or less at risk. I think of it as a 3 column wide, 5 row deep chessboard where each square has to be fought over. Better yet, it's effectively a 3D chessboard at that, because of the role that tier 3 plays in being able to move the battlefront. I love going on a global chat channel or an alliance chat server and asking where they need more bodies for the push that's currently going on, and being part of a 150 to 200 person effort to move the front line of the war another one to four rows up one column.

I'd love some minor tweaks to the constants so that the front was less static, and I think the "home rows" (fortresses) need a total redesign. But other than that, I think it's just about the coolest design for an MMO PvP system that has ever been invented, bar none. So you can just imagine how enthused I'm not that they're going to encourage half or all of the people who are currently playing that to abandon it, to instead all pile into one zone and fight there. And for what, to move the battlefield in a way that shows up on the mission tracker? No, for very short term access to something. And what is that something? A dungeon. How innovative. DO NOT WANT.

If people want to play Dark Age of Camelot, why aren't they playing Dark Age of Camelot?

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I personally agree on with you on almost all of that WAR is NOT daoc v 2.0. and I personally think Mythic is idiotic to abandon their previous assertion of getting the game fully functional in tier 4 before introducing new areas/content.

Even if they continue to give the endgame (and the rest of it for that matter) some desperatly needed polish, it is still going to be lacking if they are off building Tomb King stuff. I would personally would like to see the last two classes added, seige mechanics and fortresses/keeps/city seiges reworked and HUGE amounts of polish added in before more content.

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Having played (and enjoyed) DAoC I think you are being overly pessimistic. Ignoring the fact that an enormous shared dungeon to fight over is actually really fun (danarchy touches on why a few posts down), I believe that it will actually make the RvR fights even better. People who typically are only interested in PvEing will finally enter RvR in order to open up the mega dungeon.

The only worry I'd have is that one thing that made Darkness Falls great was the tug-of-war between the three realms to keep it open. I wonder how well this will translate to two realms, and I wonder how they intend to balance it so that a server with a dominant population on one side or the other does not end up with the new dungeon 90% of the time.

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