First of all, the staff tried to "fix" NF with bad ideas, but the community didn't do much to help either. One of the "fixes" was adding port camps which resulted in agramon being too crowded, they "fixed" that with removing teleporters completely which was a horrible Idea because:
1. Even on live you have the ability to get to agramon quickly by binding in laby near the tower stairs (you have to suicide for that, or have a bot/player with mass gateway for that but the option is still there).
2. The community was too lazy to "invent" new spots for doing solo/smallman/8v8/zerg rvr (e.g. bridges in hw/og/emain are perfect for soloing but even the chance to do that was destroyed by removing boats)
Then we got porters to laby towers which was ok, but still people focused on agramon too much (in part because the boats were still disabled for some reason). Before all that we had "the central keep" era which made no sense. Don't know what it was like before because I didn't play on uthgard at that time but I hear it was NF emain.

Blue the whines you remember mostly are from the time all porters were removed, people spammed the forums with whines because it took them 5 minutes to get to agramon(I bet most of them wish those times back now tho), plus the server population was much lower than it is now. Introducing fixes to OF won't change the fact that it is a collection of poorly designed maps.

Celteen wrote:Well for me NF kind of destroyed the whole RvR and thats why I quit for a long time with daoc. For me instant porter doesnt fit at all to daoc.

Whats daoc is about is that you can get jumped everywhere. So if you wanna go to a hot spot you might be semi afk and wups mezzed and dead
With insta ports all this stopped, no pathes anymore where you can actually ambush a bigger grp. So for me OF is the best RvR Zone ever.

Waiting 7 minutes on a pad "fits daoc"? Just lol..I'm not even ingame when I have to wait that long, I just alt-tab. That's how much fun it is. I normally have time to play but if you got like 2 hours of play and you're running through empty zones or sitting on a pad for 60-70% of the time I wouldn't even bother.

Okay you say you can have action along the way, ambush and w/e. Fair enough but in reality it's just crap. If I was a soloer I'd either have to sit on a pad, go by foot for almost 10 minutes or take the horse route and certain death during primetime. You play a bard, that works, other people can just adapt right? Or take Pennine as another example. That zone is so poorly designed it's not even funny. You have to be very careful not to aggro mobs every 1k units, never mind awesome ambushes. Maybe you like big timesinks between fights just for the sake of the possibility of ambushing/being ambushed but I sure don't. It's boring, it's annoying, it's demotivating, it's a waste of time in an already time absorbing game, in short it's dumb. But according to you that's what daoc is about right?

I voted for OF too but after playing both maps for years I now see it was out of pure nostalgia and that is a bad motivation and it clouds your judgement.

Blue wrote:Don't forget that it propably was a first euphoria which brought back many old DAoC players that were finally giving up when they found out they had to level again to 50 on a freeshard or found out that porter ceremony is back. In my opinion OF still has big potential and as you said its the zone the players which begged for "Origin" dreamed of. I'm sure with NF the overall server population would still be a lot lower.

We've had a player base of around 950-1000 long enough for most players to reach level 50 and experience end RvR. We also know that for new players, end RvR on Uthgard as it is with the current implementation is extremely demotivating because of several reasons which I have explained in other posts about current OF and casual RvR. Sure, some might have stopped because they needed to level, or because of the delayed port system (which should be improved imo), but the majority should still eventually end up in end RvR, whereas we are only seeing a few new players here and there, which usually have a really hard time staying around. End RvR is way too unfriendly to new players due to the fact that basicly every enemy they find (if they find one) after maxing out their character as much as possible before going out, is stronger than them and the only real way to counter that is to fight them, which takes so much determination, time and effort that the common player will simply stop playing on Uthgard (or end RvR) and find a game where they do not have to plow through weeks/months of frustration just to get to the good part of a game.

Of course, I agree that OF has not lost its theoretical potential, but it is up to the staff to exploit its potential correctly, by taking the right measures to ensure improved gameplay and balance to the players. Also, I agree that with NF still in place, we would probably have a lower population than we have now, but in my opinion that does not mean that we should not learn from our mistake to release new gamechanging elements with high potential in a poor state. OF could have been a much bigger 'success' than it was.

The sad part of this story is that, unfortunately, I fear that we're looking at a similar mistake on the staff's behalf on the matter of Old RAs. In theory, Old RAs + the OF revamp and improvements would bring such an incredible amount of potential that it won't be long before we are once again forced to put a cap on player numbers and are in need for a bigger server.
However I fear that the mistake that has been made with OF (release in a relatively poor/basic state), is going to be repeated with the upcoming changes, which immediately and severely poisons its potential. The initial potential will remain and again there will be a large burst in population, but over time, people again will realise the obvious flaws and player numbers will once again see a serious decrease after a relatively short period (couple of months), whereas player numbers SHOULD see a mere decline in growth or even some form of stabilisation without any real decrease after a considerably long amount of time (couple of years).

What makes me think this are the claims by the staff about the announced changes. More specificly the fact that Old RAs are planned to be released unmodified (no det for hybrids will result in a considerable amount of displeased and potentially leaving players unlike any other potential Old RA imbalance, thats why this issue is so crucial to be dealt with), nearsight will STILL not be addressed as far as we know and the BG level cap will remain level 49, whereas it should be lvl 44 at its most with the combination of improved xp spots and improved XP for RvR kills in the frontier zones only to ensure an easier transition to end RvR for the new players that will be attracted to Uthgard by the initial potential and of course for every (new) player on Uthgard.

The combination of these 3 key flaws in the announced changes WILL cause a considerably large amount of our new, and possibly even existing players to quit playing on Uthgard, whereas if they were dealth with, could add up to the potential of Old RAs and the OF revamp on itself have and therefore make this server gain more potential than any other Dark Age Of Camelot server that's still up and running today.

In the end it all boils down to that for the sake of the success of the upcoming patch and this server in its whole I (and I'm sure many others with me), urge you, the staff, to please address these three key problems with the announced changes before implementing them in order to improve the gameplay experience and thus server activity in such a substantial and thorough way that we can actually start working our way to the real Classic server population numbers.

i voted OF and would still probably vote OF. i think its a nice zone. what i really think needs some work is the keep system and mob spawns in odins and hadrians. the keep system is very simple and there is very little to promote people fighting hard for their keeps or even defending them at all, especially if the people online in the defending realm dont care about DF, which is pretty often the case. the scattered nature of the mob camps on odins and hadrians make these zones very tiresome to roam for groups, especially if you got a couple level 40-49 in group because in odins there is a ton of level 35 mobs on paths who is gray to 50 but green to 40s. i have made some suggestions to improve the keep systems in other threads so i wont go on about that at length (improved realm spam, more keep related bonuses), but there is a lot of simple ideas floating around that could be done to improve this stuff.

tl;dr
+ stay OF and work on it

anyone did rvr today or all too busy spamming the forum? again hib frontier (from emain to cruachan) was lot of action and alb frontier even more for the last 1.5 hour 'till i logged 10 mins ago. We stayed in hib as our grp was kickass grp today.

Seems hadrians is establishing well for pug grps.

In both frontiers more FG's running than in whole NF on a normal weekday back then.

Blue wrote:

Disdain wrote:

Blue wrote:I told you it got better after we took action, introduced XP spots and finally instant ports to Agramon. Before it was degrading more and more and server population was shrinking. OF is by far not in that bad state NF was even with no changes applied yet.

YES EXACTLY! Not rvr population but general server population. Rvr population didn't change much since then. Don't mix those two up.

This is wrong again. I'll stop to discuss with you. Its plain waste of my precious time.

typical GM response

And he is actually correct, the RVR population has not increased much relative to the general population, and action is actually harder to come by because the zones are larger. You would be able to know this if you actually PLAYED IN RVR rather than just do some /online command. The RVR population is tiny, and the playerbase consists of people coming and going every few weeks, and there are a VERY select few who rvr consistently at lvl 50(relative to the general population).

Let me chek OF= 4 zones per realm
NF= same than OF plus agramon, plus water zone, way bigger than of and people still complaint about that, i still havent a night with no action in alb frontier ( i dont do emain never ) and got 2 chars to rank 6 doing rvr im alb/midland, and i usually dont play everyday and dont do rvr everyday.

Maidrion wrote:normally have time to play but if you got like 2 hours of play and you're running through empty zones or sitting on a pad for 60-70% of the time I wouldn't even bother.

Maybe you should die less often if you wait 60-70% of your gametime for ports.

Pelusilla wrote:Let me chek OF= 4 zones per realm
NF= same than OF plus agramon, plus water zone, way bigger than of and people still complaint about that, i still havent a night with no action in alb frontier ( i dont do emain never ) and got 2 chars to rank 6 doing rvr im alb/midland, and i usually dont play everyday and dont do rvr everyday.

NF with zones that were active on uthgard (agramon, HW,OG,emain) are a LOT smaller than the 3 huge OF maps. Imagine that, smaller area (That can be made bigger if the need ever arises), with NO choke points and way better design (unless you like to claim the "NF WAS MADE BY GINGERS, IT HAS NO SOUL" argument).

Oh and killing guards in alb frontier is not rvring.

We already had enough of these threads. As Blue stated we are currently working on improvements for the OF zones to make it more attractive. Stop capturing every post for the same topic.

P.S.:

§2.3 Staff authority
The authority of the Uthgard staff is unimpeachable in all community parts. Staff decisions are to be followed and not to be discussed. Violations may result in punishments. In serious cases they may even result in a permanent ban.


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