A Discussion

[Sharkith]

I think this discussion is a dead horse. There are a lot of lame things you can do in this game Requiel, walk-trough, strafe, relic raids with little defense if you want, RR11 vs RR3 group, 8 vs 1, certain classes and so on. It is all by design, if it upsets players when it's repeated often and when it's hurting the playerbase, change the design. Change the design of how relics are taken, voila. Mythic did start a good way with the class changes, so this could be possible.

The second thing is the human nature, some people will just whine because of a lost relic like a lost toy but you will often find them in a category that is definatly causing some grief to some other players, so I think the whine is unjustified.

Dyvet is going bad atm, I know you are monitoring the situation, more and more people will leave unless there is something we can look forward to soon though.

This is more an expression of opinion rather than a direct argument. Lame play is not grief play. This is a crucial distinction. It is the specific 'intent' of the player to upset someone and spoil their game that is the crucial thing about grief play. There is an important difference.

Horner for example is a grief player he /rudes everyone he kills using his lame play. The move from lame to grief is actually quite clear. He gets away with it and GOA do nothing that escapes me. Although I have to admit I find him funny and he is after all mostly harmless .

Not defining the problem and not dealing with clear cases if it that go on repeatedly simply astounds me especially when it was clearly damaging the population. I hope we can nail this down once and for all I really do.

Another example perhaps when I was soloing on Sharkith I got ganked one evening by a certain mid Zerg I think 5 times in a row. In the end they made a surrender sign to me and did not kill me the next time I went out. I got killed five times by lame play and in the end they recognised what they were doing and stopped. The grief player does not stop.

The only case of a relic raid recently by Albs that was not an AC raid was Muly's raid which just happened to go on longer than usual. In no way was this grief play or lame in my book - they deserved their relic. Kinetix and others have understood that it is griefing players. Why GOA do not escapes me at the moment. We can debate that issue and we will be debating the real problem here.

What has happened here is that a lot of people have been afraid to call it what it is. Once you stop calling it and AC raid and directly call it griefing it opens up a much more direct line of discussion. So lets have it. Lets not evade the question by asking why I feel upset and then asking me if my feelings are legitimate which is what you are doing Requiel. Ask the real question is it griefing?

By definition it is because we have had expressed here by several invidiauls that they fully intended to upset others and spoil their game when they took relics in the early hours. Other have admitted something that GOA could not prove i.e. that they did it over a sustained period of time. I for one had no idea it was 6 times.

Now rather than get into a witch hunt against people who have admitted this. I applaud Blow and Kinetix and kagato for being honest it help us see what is happening. Now we should stick to the point of the discussion. I hope for once it achieves something productive because this has cost me an awful lot of time to debate.

 

[Sigwyen]

Well i havent read the last 2 pages cuz they just came down to flaming sadly ...

I think its good Req made this tread and i think for the majority of the posters in it its been constructive ... primarely thinking of Charm, , keg, kin and shark ...

Ur combined post desribes the situation rather well ... There's alot of anger on thise servers and theby alot of grief play ... I for one would like to see the vicius circle changed.

But we would have to face tha fact aswell that this is a realm war and u can not have a war if everything is peach ...

We are fighting our enemies and this can be done in many ways and to demoralize ur enemie is by fact haf the victory ..
this has recently been done by albs AC'ing and equally by mids painting Albion Blue ...

So to restore honorable warfare we more or less all want in this game we would have to slack down on the grief play by all of us ... ofc. not to much cuz frankly u need to "hate" ur enemie for u to fullharted fight him ..

I'm truly looking forward to read Req's reply on Grief play and in generel on how to restore sotg on thiese servers

/Mirk

(Dont take my Hate literally its all in the spirit of roleplaying

 

[Sharkith]

- Some people play at nights, they are bored, they take a relic with little opposition. Some victims of their actions see it as grief play.

- Some people choose to be next to a tower only and they only engage in already ongoing fights from safe distance against targets that are low on health. Some victims of their actions see it as grief play.

Fatload knew he was griefing, he did it on purpose, he used to make fun of his victims in his grats thread, he pretended to be the cool guy just playing the game and so on, just like the people doing relic raids in the night.

So in my opinion he has no right to complain, no right to use CM in order to bad mouth them because in the eyes of not only me he is a griefer himself and I am sure he caused as much harm to the server as the people he is attacking.

By definition he isn't - he never once cl;aimed he was doing it to annoy people. On the other hand we have others who have finally admitted that they did it to grief people. The crucial thing is what do you intend by your actions.

Now the latter point is very hard to prove of course. This is what made it so difficult for GOA to agree with me when I brought it to them. But fair play to both Requiel and the others who have been open and frank with us here. There has been griefing over relics now we can say it for certain. As for your witch hunt with Fatload - your wrong clearly by the definition posted on page 3 of this thread you are far off the mark Manisch.

There is no evidence that he intended to grief people.

 

[Manisch Depressiv]

So the people asleep can avoid having their relics taken? care to explain how?

You are clutching at straws here and its fun, keep it coming.

Btw are you in CM?

Tell me Mr. Logic please, how can I avoid your unvisible toon with ranged attacks? Did you buy that bridge btw? I know you were engaging on purpose on fights from players from your own realm that didn't want your help, destroying the fun for them where you didn't have to because they asked you to stop and you had the choice. You hurted a very small player base (of the few people left who wanted to have a chance to finish a 1 vs 1) this way while you kept doing it.

What has my opinion to do with whever I am in CM or not? I didn't participate in any of CM's relic raids afair, regardless of the day time they were done. I have my own opinion, you will not find me attacking a solo fight or a known solo'er when I am in a FG for example or interfering with someone elses fight when I am solo.

I participated once in a true alarm clock relic raid with over 70 Albs at a Saturday morning pre-cluster that was arranged by the whole of realm for some serious payback to Hibs and I'd do it again as it was my first time and I was very excited. Getting a relic a normal way was next to impossible with the shroom farms, pre Heretic and cross realmers spying in the battle group.

The players have the right to participate in all possible ways while the server is running, regardless of the time.

I couldn't care less if a realm has all 6 relics, I wouldn't whine over it how it has been taken and make this a reason for me to leave. I can understand the issue though and I asked to change the mechanics of relics a couple of times now as well as I have asked to have a 1 vs 1 instance and battle grounds with limited player numbers to avoid players like you so everybody can have his own freedom. I don't believe the realm game.

What I don't like are people like you who badmouth whole guilds, you don't even know half of the people and what do you know anyway since you are stuck to the very same bringe since your birth doing the same thing over and over again?

 

[Phantomby]

AC raids the the anger people feel is the tip of the iceberg for an unsatisfactory playing experience. Let me explain...Warning...these are gereralisations but are relatively accurate for a majority of players.

Previously (the golden days as some say) in OF relic raids mattered, there was a sense of accomplishment and pride in having done one, however now as the population doesnt support 24/7 gameplay any old group or two can have an impact on an entire realms experience by capturing a relic with minimal resistence out of peek hours.

As mentioned cluster faces a population problem, NF doesnt make for a good play experience when there are too few people. Nobody likes to spend most of their play time doing nothing which is exactly what happens when you repeatedly boat ride to enemy territory and get zerged down by multiple opponents or the action is too spread out so you roam for an hour away from zerg and find only a fight or two. This is why IRVR is more popular now, because of the quick turn around of action, less time spent doing nothing constructive and more time doing the fun things like killing enemies. However noone wants IRVR in their land because it brings that realm so much closer to a possible AC RR.

People play this game over and over because of RVR, where anything can happen and rarely does the same way twice. Its variety and competition which humans thrive on. You can argue there is a contingent of PVE'rs but to be brutaly honest they will accomplish and gather as much as they want then move on to another game with fresh challenges, its the RVR'rs that stay for the long haul.

I also remember that there were far fewer people with toons on multiple realms, (we always had the rerollers) but it had far less impact with more people playing and less jumping ship and rolling with the relic bonuses. No its a simple case of logging out one toon and logging in on another side.

Realm pride has since disintigrated with the possibility of having multiple toons on diff realms so people overall care with less passion about their realm as a whole and more about their online play time experience.

This has lead to more and more QQ about play styles which in turn has lead to more people developing a close knit group of friends and not caring about anyone outside of these cliques (generally with a few exceptions from really friendly people).

All of this compounds the polulation problem, as a new player getting no help and no invites would you stick around to discover the wonderful world of RVR?

So what we are left with is a hardcore of players who are set in multiple realms and play the toon they feel will get the most accomplished with.

This is the one reason why many who still play have rerolled on higher population servers, to recapture the excitement of rvr against different opponents rather than the same few groups over and over again.

So for those who do spend most of their time in one realm and do a well timed raid against opposition for a relic they feel so cheated when it disappears hours later. Its a pointless exercise.

I dont think GOA have done a good job of advertising or letting the general world know about their product. Most new players are from word of mouth advertising.
Cure your population problems and the server attitude will start to get better.

 

[Clive Aminal]

As a hib player, I can't actually remember the last time someone said, hmm, lets organise a relic raid.

The usual attitude is that we wouldn't stand a chance, and even if by some miricle we succeeded, it would be AC'd away by morning anyway.

Seriously tho, how do you actually go about organising a Hib relic raid at primetime now? The population is too low, where would you start, could you possibly get three or four grps organised? and would those grps survive agains the inevitable Alb zerg truck that will come along and flatten it....Somehow I seriously doubt it.

I think under population is the biggest culprit here. Having played daoc since before SI, I still don't understand why GoA has NEVER advertised DAOC in britain. I have never even seen a backpage advert in a gaming magazine for it, yet GoA wonders why it's english speaking servers are suffering?

I honestly think that within a year GoA will have no choice but to either:

1) Cluster excal/pry with a german server ( we all know how popular with the english speakers that was on Glastonbury)
2) Close all the english euro servers
3) Sell the accounts back to Mythic with the intention of a US cluster.

 

[Methos]

The whole AC raid drama can be ended by Mythic if they implement population specific keep bonusses.

I'll elaborate:

In OF, it wasn't practical to try take a relic with 1 or 2FG due to the number and level of the relic keep guards.

Why not reintroduce a part of this, moderated by the number of people on the defending realm?

Lets say albs are doing a nighttime raid on mids and /who NF shows 30 albs and 30 mids: no changes, normal keep strength.

Now let's say /who NF shows 30 albs and 5 mids: 4 'OF style' relic guards spawn the moment a relic keep door/wall is being attacked. This makes the keep harder, but not impossible, to take for nighttime raiders that are looking for an easy keep.

This should only apply to single keeps holding a relic, not the normal process of opening relic gates, and should also be modified according to the level of the keep itself.

 

[Everz]

tbh, AC relics do play a small part in why i dont play nomore, firstly i had quit several months before due to boredom same thing again etc, then mast started doing those AC raids, never had so much fun in daoc along time, i thought personally that yes, this has saved the server these are ace, unbeatable, logged happy with how daoc is going for the first time in a along time. Then to wake up in the morning to the whine posts and the relics/towers/keeps you faught for sometimes a large sum of hours for have all vanished in the early morning just gives the 'why bother', i mean i reactivated for this raid to see if much changed, the day after my acc was closed again.

but a major contributing factors is.. noone i know plays anymore on euro, i cant log on go /who alliance of power etc and see all m8s on there, i cant see noone on my friends list, hardly anyone in guild.. 'why bother'

US is the way forward, i know loads who would love to play there exc/pryd toons, but they are put off by the lowpops, cluster us with killbury or caerleon for some serious fun and a great server once again.

 

[AngelHeal]

Requiel it's very easy:

People can't be arsed dooing so much trouble, with 200 + man, when 1 fg can just take it back next thing in the morning.. it's called waste of time.

 

[Sollac]

My opinion

having played for a long while since i discovered DAoC, I would like to point out the one thing that I think was a major flaw in the history of DAoC.

In my opinion NF should have been released before TOA.

Everyone was happy with SI and OF the way it was.....keeps with really hard guards....now people go hunting towers and keeps that are unclaimed/green as they can be done easily with 1fg, even 3 scouts can take a tower......

imagine that in OF.

The NPC's in NF need to be increased in level, if keep/tower green (50), blue (55), etc to purple at (75)

and have more guards static.

one other thing is that the game has been altered. progress they say...
I play a armsman, always have.... in OF i could chase down a caster and kill it, now i even look funny at a hib/mid caster im dead.

the magic in the game has escalated beyond belief......the new patches coming give even more caster love.....the rogues and tanks of the game have either got to be very high rr or in a good grp to even survive.

OF the magic damage was less than it is today, I can hit casters for 600+ and still they manage to run away and nuke the crap out of me....perhaps its my playstyle, but fundmentally there is an inhererant imbalance between melee and magic.

the thing i want to ask requiel is....can the excal server cope with the high population people wish for, as lag is apparent within the server as it is, butdo we really wanna go back the the days of realm boots and zone crashes?

The problem is people on this server cluster think there way is best for the server. i play my way .....if that happens to be the same for the realm then great . if not oh well.

I believe goa need to relax alittle on the rules and then look at the people playing and work out what we really want and giove it too us.

This is not the same as wat we say we want, its what we want fopr the game that is good for the game.

also i know its toolate, but each account should have been restricted to one account per realm from the very start.....this would have solved so many problems.

when clustered players should have been given a choice of which realm to play and then if they had other toons on secondary server they should have been given plat or exp or some kind of compensation for the loss of characters(free play for 3/6 months would have worked).


thats my fews.

 

[Mastade]

See it from a guy that has lead quite a few primetime rvr raids point of view.

When i came back before i started on doing my socalled MREs albs had done alot of AC raids and those hibs i talked to was very annoyed about that, noone wanted to bother doing anything primetime than just their own little thing, and i still understand that.

I didnt have any set grps at that time and i didnt feel like playing my NS much so i decided to make a primetime raid for people that didnt normally rvr much, give something back to the community. I knew that if we were to have the numbers to go for a relic primetime, we couldn't do it the silent way of pming gm's of guilds, so i just decided to make it public, and kept doing that. Screw that the enemy would know about, the more the merrier.

The main purpose was ofcourse to have fun and i can only say we achieved that almost every single time, it brought the community together. So much that even the set groups skipped their daily rvr runs to agramon to participate and help out, and they have been quite an important factor on alot of the MREs - Sometimes we even managed to get a hold on a relic, and wow.. getting a relic primetime with an underpopualted realm takes alot of effort from everyone but when you finaly succeed it makes it all worthwhile getting that little bonus from all the hard work. But then you wake up, go to work, come home, log in to see all the hard work from yesterdays night is reversed, it makes you feel that what you are doing is pointless and makes you think:" why even bother"

For me its all about respecting people. Something that is very important on a small server if you want things to be kept alive. the FG rvr community know this and thats why they dont add on eachother, jump eachother when resting and so on. If they dont respect eachother people will stop logging on and they wont have anyone to fight. Its the same in the solo rvr community, the smaller the server/cluster has gotten, the more respect for the enemy have i seen in the solo rvr community. The same goes for the large scale rvr. If people are gonna be lame and AC whatever the enemy takes during the night, then the enemy will stop logging on and you wont get to defend against huge number of people and miss out on all the mass rvr which has been a whole lot of fun... for the time it lasted.. Its just too late now, and that pisses me off tbh, cuz i knew it would be too late if this spirale of hate kept on going. I hoped the enemy would be inspired to do the same kinda raids and get their realms together so all the action would be pulled towards primetime, but well, it never really got to that... unfortunately..

Im playing on Avalon atm, really enjoying it. I didnt leave because of all the AC raids, but because the cluster is so small you wont get the numbers to do anything close to exciting primetime. The server is in my eyes, dead.. and i feel like i could just delete chars with the total value of ~15-20mil rps..

 

[whitelights]

hmmm

As one of the RelicRaidleaders (starters)since mostly Arepa took the Raids over when we had already 2 keeps, i also have an idea about how and in what way a AlarmClock Raid influence the game and his players.

I think first u have to ask urself the question what people's motivation is by doing a regular Relic Raid or AlarmClockRaid.
Are u trying to demotivate people with an AC raid on your enemy's relics?
Are u doing an AC raid to retrieve your own relic ?
Is an AC raid your very last option since u are compleet outnumbered on a 10 versus 100 base?And a primetime/daytime raid can never lead to a nice balanced fight ?
Or maybe your personal moral is at the level that u don't care at all about the realms and the players in it, and u only want to do your stuff whenever u like it?

I think that most people who actualy do AC raids have to think about what they actualy bring into the game to lift it to a higher level or break it down until the entire fun and compatitive spirit is gone.
I also still believe that there is some sort of responsibility a Raidleader has to carry when he does actions that inflict all realms.
What u see atm is that some certain players provide themselfs of the freedom to do whatever they want even when this damages an entire server population.
The real purpose and effect of the relics dissappears from the moment these certain players play in a way that can be called "untouchable".

Lets look at the current situation :

Hibernia looses their relics over an AC raid performed by Albion, did they get the honor to atleast defend their frontier? No, not even when they were underpopulated they did not get a chance to do anything about it! Lets face it : the moderate player in Europe still likes a couple hours of sleep everyday , we do not have sush a largescale timezone overlay that justifies large realm population differences.
So now tbh what do you expect from a regular Hibernia player, does he have a good feeling when they try to retake their relics back with only less then half the population off their opponent? Do you realy expect that this person is having a good time when he logs on with the idea he will never be able to restore what was taken ?
The least these relicraiders could have done was giving them a fair chance to defend their relics!
To me and to the most of other players in BG and on ventrilo the last days with me , these kind of actions only wil damage the whole game and spirit!

So u can ask now why did we do a daytime raid for the last 2 days now :

First i want to state that : to have a fair balanced fight in the late afternone/evening u will need to start a raid during the day.Since u need 3 keeps to be taken before one of the relicgates open, with one of these keeps a high importance one with mostly high defences Beno,Bled or DC.
If u start a raid arround lets say 21 00 cet in the evening u will end up arround 0300 in the morning with a fight arround the relicgates temples , wich to me seems kinda late for a regular day in the week or ofc when u are on a 100 to 10 base u can do it in less then 3 hours but thats not the situation atm.

Basicly most of the BG members didn't care at all about a relic taking or not , 75 % of the population will say , I don't give a damn, tomorow they are PVE'd back by some AC raiders.(is this a normal response of the regular player ? does goa or do you as players seriously want this ?) For me this ruins the spirit or atleast is some proof of it!

So what is left for a player who knows he can't do anything about this situation ? U try to give some sort of signal saying plzz we have enough of this, what leads to the last 2 raids in wich almost the entire albion frontier was taken together with the relics. Mid players starting to sympathise with Hib players, who can understand their greeves, wich also is straight human i think.
No remorse for any albion players !

Also Albion players have clearly stated that they dislike this kind off playstyle, and some even rerolled to other realms /servers!

I think there is very much need of some sort of regulation arround this topic since for many players the whole AC Relic affair is becoming a verry annoying situations that ruins peoples game.

If a AC raid happens 1 time every year people will laugh about it and say , yay we got a new challenge to go for.
But when it happens every month or lets say when a compleet realm population can predict it, the fun is gone , by far!.

Whitelights ml10 rr 11L1 pac healer Red Guard.
:worthy:

 

[Appollo]

I dont understand the question

 

[Matriarch|Sneakers]

Long post

In my opinion, this has nothing to do with right and wrong. What the Game designers/GM/spokesmen have to consider is the outcome of some/ peoples and their own actions.

1) Is ACing good for the community and development of the game?

2) Is OPed classes good for the community and the development/diversity of the game?

3) Is imbalanced abilites good for the community and development of the game and the diversity in playstyles.

As I see it mythic/goa often failed to look at things this way. One random exampel is when warlocks was introduced that was a total failure...and endless of times Mythic/GoA have followed this line of bad desicions; this piss alot of people off and in the end will be bad for the community, the games development and the diversity of classes.

A game or server should be looked at as a community, a country or a society if you like. X action will have Y and Z as outcome, and Y and Z will result in A, B and C.


When it comes to ACing if I where in charge I would reason around the outcome of it, if the outcome is good, bad or neutral.
Is there anything I as designer could do to tackle this issue without actually directly instruction/enforcing rules on people.

The first thing that pops up in my head is tougher guards. Now I have to reason why / why not this is a good alteration, what will the outcome of this be and what other possible side-effects could this have?


I'm striving away from your topic here abit but I'm just so unpleased with the handling of the server this last year(s).

 

[Malcolm]

More and more I'm drifting away from playing here mostly because increasing a lot of crap happening in-game is a result of "pissing competitions" between a small minority of people who are constantly bickering, QQing and insulting each other on FH and use the game as a blunt instrument to get back at their "adversaries".

This isn't helped by the general lack of respect here for others' playstyles (calls of "leet", "zergling", "adder" etc) coupled with insults based on sweeping generalisations against people because they chose a specific realm and/or a specific class.

 

[TheBinarySurfer]

I moved to the US - both my accounts have since lapsed and I have little intention of renewing them at this time due to RL circumstances and lack of a group to return to on the cluster.

Ill keep this fairly straightforward and broken down into points - the reason itself is in bold - if you want the detailed explenation continue reading below each point.

1) Lack of good groups (be it 8v8 or zerg surfers)
Evita (see sig) was finding it almost impossible to get groups despite being well known and a competent player. Also the changes made by Mythic to provide more cross-class utility to all Alb classes over the last 3+ years have removed the need for a "jack of all trades". The above problem is partially due to lack of groups full-stop, but compounded by the classes undesireability in groups.

2)The inability of the Minstrel to win more than 1-2 solo fights per 15 mins:
I've written pages and pages of feedback to Mythic regarding this. All well-reasoned with experiences, screenshots, damage logs, fraps descriptions of scenarios and cause and effect-charts showing how the changes impact other alb classes. All have been ignored or received polite canned feedback. The Minstrel TL's have made me aware that 95% of the changes suggested will not be considered by Mythic. The class therefore remains unplayable except for 1-2 minutes out of 15 where it can win vs a half-decent player. So i retired her. I took up the Sorc class for fun, but quickly found that the problem with a lack of good players / groups mentioned in point 1) was still evident.

3)Friends leaving:
I built and ran two set-groups (Depending on how you count different groups I suppose) from scratch and we got up to a competent level where we could give anyone except Maelstrom a good fight in an 8v8 situation - and could make a huge difference in a zerg scene. This level of communication and playstyle / practise isn't easy to find. I simply didn't have the energy to go through the process of finding 4 or more replacements and getting them to a good realm-rank, practised etc etc again due to my work taking priority. I had 6 friends from EU move to the US servers, so logically I moved with them. Before you all say "thats being elitist" - its not - within this game there is nothing that compare to the fun you can have with people you play for several hours a night, several nights a week with for months on end - they become your friends and you have fun together that isnt dependent on just the RvR groups. Truth be told i miss those times.

4)Population levels on the US clusters and activity levels:
Sorry to bring this one up but its a hard fact - it took me over 4 months to get ONE character ML9 and RR5+ on the EU servers. On the US it took me one month to get TWO RR5+ chars ML10 and CL10. The action, the ML and artifact raids you need to be competitive etc - are simply so frequent as to be almost nightly - ML1-10 is run at least once a month often more, and mass-artifact raids are run daily. I'd say this is one key reason why the US is healthier as a cluster - its a HELL of a lot easier for new players to get to the endgame. Plus i can log in at 2000 UK time on a weekday and theres still well over 300 players in the frontiers - thats more than the EU cluster had onpeak when i left and thats 1500 in the afternoon over there. As i write this i just looked at camelot-europe and theres 300 players on TOTAL on the UK cluster - as a test i just logged onto the US cluster - total players online for the Caerleon cluster is over 900 currently...

5)The continued AC raids
This didnt have too much of an impact for me, but when I got chain-flamed and people citing the reason for adding on my (rare) solo fights for running with Custodia on nights they weren't AC'ing i just thought "sod it getting shit thrown at me constantly isn't fun, and thats what i pay money for".

6)Customer Service
Not a reason for leaving per se but a reason not to return. I've had no less than 6 problems in my 3 months US-side that required an /appeal. Out of those 6 problems, 5 were resolved within 15 mins, and the other within 4 hours. Rightnow and your response times are simply put, massively inferior. And when you can only play for x hours between certain times on certain days of the week quick resolution of the problem is what you want since you often cant just "shift" the playtime to another day - its lost unless things are dealt with quickly. I've never sent something to rightnow that has been resolved quicker than 4 working days - whereas one of those problems was resolved at 1030 EST on a Sunday night on the US within 5 mins.


One further comment:
Requiel, people have taken the time to answer your queries here to enable you to better make decisions in the future regarding the cluster, please reciprocate and tell the players here what the long-term plan for the English-Speaking cluster is? These clusterings are nothing more than band-aids and everyone knows it. Your continued silence on this matter will not help the playerbase grow for certain.

If i missed a quantative statement on this matter I retract the above paragraph, but I have been keeping half an eye on the situation via friends and the forums and haven't seen anything.




Edit: Kairamar makes a good point - nobody gives a shit about AC'ers on the US clusters as theres enough people online to thwart a raid even at 0500 local time to the servers. Population is the key here.

 

[Zede]

Their is nothing wrong with AC raids.

The only problem is lack of ppl in rvr during the night.

Only advertising from Mythic/GoA can solve this without changing the game mechanics - more people and AC raids are no big deal, as every realm has people online.

To little, to late.

 

[Straef]

I've never been a great fan of AC raids myself, and usually can't even be bothered taking keeps at prime time. I never gave much of a shit about relics or keep bonuses either, as it's alright to have the bonuses and nice to have more enemies out for lacking the bonuses. The only thing I do mind, when on about keeps and such, is the ability, or lack of it, to teleport to your destination. When solo I wouldn't bother going out at all, unless able to at least port to a boat or some spot near the action. With a group we'd still go out, even lacking teleporting locations, just to split up after one or two deaths because it's just not worth the time to travel somewhere just get zerged, or to find zero action.
And this doesn't just happen with AC raids, as you might aswell find yourself unable to port due to some prime-time raid, but with an AC raid it's more likely to be a big number of towers/keeps, whereas you can always port to a different location if some group decides to take one of your keeps at prime time.
So, being unable to move from one spot to another without having to sit in a boat for half an hour is the only thing I directly dislike about AC raids.
The indirect consequences are what really bothers me. Having people bitch over the same old thing on FH gets boring, and that goes for whine threads about AC raids too. Having Mid/Hib teaming up against Albion, even if it's not an everyday thing, gets on my tits aswell, as the only people 'suffering' from it are the people who never even joined in on any AC raids.
Then there's also the thing that if a whole realm is unable to port, there'll be a whole bunch of players like me, unwilling to travel half an hour to find an empty zone or to get killed in half a second, thus dropping the number of people out in rvr. And then there's people moving to different servers, tho I can't imagine that being over AC raids alone.

 

[daoc_xianghua]

Raven and Fatload.
It's not my intention to dredge up an issue that we've been over multiple times in various places already. Everything I want to say on that topic is in the relevant threads and in the RightNow conversation I had with Sharkith.

What I'm trying to do is inject some perspective and get a proper discussion going where people can show the reasons they may have for their strong views on either side of the fence. I'm concerned that people are more interested in furthering division rather than trying to put forward a reasoned argument for their opinions. Whichever line you happen to hold to, there's little to be gained from simply antagonising the rest of the community.

dont wanna go into this too far as its been discussed multiple times as you said but just look at it from a pragmatic pov.
your goal at goa should be (and i guess it is) to keep the servers alive as long as any possible. the past has shown well enuff that AC raids piss off alot more ppl than there are ppl that dont care about it. doesnt matter if its right or wrong, everyone is free to have his own opinion about that, but you as the hoster of the game should react in the favour of the majority of the player base. the permanent decreasing of the server pop is a good sign that the majority is against it. ofc i´m aware of that not everyone who left the game in the past year left cuz of the AC raids but alot did and alot more quitted cuz of the none existant action which got caused by the AC raids if you think about it that way.

now its on you as a company to set an end to this if you rly want to keep the server alive by forbid ppl to do AC raids and ban them if they still continue doing it.

ofc if its long decided that goa wants to let the english cluster die so they can close it and use the resources for upcoming WAR i can fully understand how you react on this matter. i dont know what you are planning so i can just guess.

but if thats not the case you should see that the path you´ve chosen on that matter is the path to the death of this server in the long run as more ppl gonna leave which leads to even less action which therefor leads to more ppl leaving. voila theres your never ending circle.

if you set an end to this now MAYBE some ppl MIGHT come back and action will increase again and will therefor lead to more ppl coming back as i guess that alot of the avalon rerollers would rather play on a english server if it had the same action than avalon has. it might already be too late now tho as english servers are basically dead already :|

 

[Tuthmes]

And to add to that Kagato, as pointed out by Sharkith it's not about 1 AC. It's about it beeing a constant from alb side, especially a certain guild. That's called grief play.
AC'ing a relic once in whiled, fine. Doing it on purpose (or just in general fking up the warmap) day in day out from 2-6am isnt. Especially if this is done on purpose. Would like to add to this that the whole mindstate of albs has gone this way. We'll defend ren with the hib relic, cause we can easily pve ours back, etc etc.
Just search for threads you, Kinetix, Muyl, Blow have posted in and you'll see a distinct patern.

 

[Sollac]

dont wanna go into this too far as its been discussed multiple times as you said but just look at it from a pragmatic pov.
your goal at goa should be (and i guess it is) to keep the servers alive as long as any possible. the past has shown well enuff that AC raids piss off alot more ppl than there are ppl that dont care about it. doesnt matter if its right or wrong, everyone is free to have his own opinion about that, but you as the hoster of the game should react in the favour of the majority of the player base. the permanent decreasing of the server pop is a good sign that the majority is against it. ofc i´m aware of that not everyone who left the game in the past year left cuz of the AC raids but alot did and alot more quitted cuz of the none existant action which got caused by the AC raids if you think about it that way.

now its on you as a company to set an end to this if you rly want to keep the server alive by forbid ppl to do AC raids and ban them if they still continue doing it.

ofc if its long decided that goa wants to let the english cluster die so they can close it and use the resources for upcoming WAR i can fully understand how you react on this matter. i dont know what you are planning so i can just guess.

but if thats not the case you should see that the path you´ve chosen on that matter is the path to the death of this server in the long run as more ppl gonna leave which leads to even less action which therefor leads to more ppl leaving. voila theres your never ending circle.

if you set an end to this now MAYBE some ppl MIGHT come back and action will increase again and will therefor lead to more ppl coming back as i guess that alot of the avalon rerollers would rather play on a english server if it had the same action than avalon has. it might already be too late now tho as english servers are basically dead already :|

I dont ac raid as i like my sleep, but this is not workable asthis is goa actively participating and influencing the outcome.....bad idea.

just make guards purple full stop and have alot more guards, I would say double the amount.

you must notice that all guards in keeps and towers are mainly tanks and rogues witha few casters...Add more casters to the battlements, cant take the relic if you cant get to the keep.

 

[kirennia]

If they honestly leave because a relic got taken, then they have a serious problem with taking this game to seriously.

Rubbish. If you were to play a first person shooter whereby everytime you logged off your save games were reset, how long before you'd get bored of playing the same first easy levels time and time again.

Stop telling people what they must be feeling just because they have a different opinion to you. I left with a main contributing factor of AC raids and GoAs actions in mind and that's it.

edit:This is pretty pointless anyway until Requiel posts a reply.

 

[Tuthmes]

edit:This is pretty pointless anyway until Requiel posts a reply.

Why do some people insist on hearing more from Requiel about this part? Think he has bin quite fair saying that personally he did find AC'ing lame. You can't however expect him/Goa to do something about it, unless this become's a point for more servers? Wouldnt this be something for Mythic/EA to change?
Doesn't change the fact that Goa went over the top with banning people for lowering a keep lvl (which is legit), but went against the SoTG, cause some idiot whinged about it.
Nor does it change the fact that the english GM's are not active at all on the cluster.

They can't define SotG, nor grief play. Fatload can say: "Don't come near DC or ill will add on your fight over and over again." CM can say: "We'll PvE keep's and relics over and over again."
If you where in Requiels shoes what would you do about it?
Also it might have something todo with numbers, though.... If 2 or 3 guilds(or 21players) on avalon would get the same mentality as CM does, wouldnt the same happen there?

 

[technasia]

I dont think those AC raids realy made that much difference on the population, lots of ppl left cause there was just to few ppl out to kill, fg action makes rvr going, the more fg's running around, the more zergs there are out, and that benifits all 3 realms, just look at avalon.

Most ppl just like to play in a fg and have constant action. this wasnt the case anymore on cluster so people went slowly to avalon/lyo/us/freeshard servers.

I bet if you would ask them all ( would you like to play on cluster again if there are lots of ppl on it ? ) they would probably all say yes

But Requiel, in one of your post you said exca/pryd cluster was still very much alive and cluster wasnt needed.
Explain to me why you cluster'd avalon and lyo then? There pop was like 4 times higher then on the english cluster and still you decide to cluster them and leave exca/pryd cluster like it was ... i mean either im just stupid but where's the logic in clustering 2 servers that have realy high population, and leave the one that realy needs it alone? I can only think of 1 thing that might be the reason and thats if its not possible, but you cant find any record of that so.. :/

 

[Icebreaker]

It demoralises the other realms and discourages people from doing it the hard way.
This one I have some sympathy with. I can see the point that if someone's worked hard and had a hard fight to take a keep, it doesn't seem fair that the work can be undone by an easy off-peak retake. To counter that I'd point out that the hard way is the fun way. If you're in a siege, you should be having fun - otherwise you would presumably choose to do something else with your time. If you have fun taking the keep, why wouldn't you have fun retaking it the next evening? Or defending for that matter? If you want to do large scale RvR then that option is still available despite the fact that other people were taking keeps at a different time to you, in fact large scale RvR becomes more likely as retake BGs are set up to reclaim keeps lost overnight, if you prefer to do your keep raiding primetime then you have lost nothing because someone else was playing the same game at off peak. Recently there have been some very successful and involving prime time raids on all realms. Any realm on this cluster has the potential to be able to raid any other realm effectively at primetime. I can see the numbers in the frontiers from all realms from a much more global perspective than simply doing /who NF, RvR population is actually more balanced than most people would think it is. In the Frontier right this moment, the Mids are outnumbering the Albs by about 4 to 3, no realm is too large to take on.

I am aware that some people have cited AC raids as a reason to move to other servers. I'd like to ask those people if they can explain what exactly it was about this issue that made them take that choice? I'd also be interested in hearing other reasons people may have for holding extreme negative views on the topic. Like I said at the top though, keep it civil please.

Thank you for reading.

I started to play DAoC because of the big battles.There wasn't really opted Groups out (apart from Nolby Pride).Most of the Battles were huge and fun.And still i love big sieges, battles, relic raids most. There were nighttime raids in the past here and there but not really a problem.But the past months where just stupid. Everything we did in Hibernia got destroyed the next morning which isn't fun at all.

We had alot great raid leaders and lots of events which were all fun even without any success. But the next morning (most of the time) everything was retaken or even our own Relics were taken without being able to take part in it. I haven't been able to take part in any relic defence the past few months. So no point for me to continue on this Server. And taking a Relic with hard work is pointless aswell because of the ac raids.

So bye bye Daoc until the Developers have a solution for this issue. And yes i think relic raids should be something for the masses and not for 2 full groups in the morning.

 

[Influenza]

I dont think those AC raids realy made that much difference on the population, lots of ppl left cause there was just to few ppl out to kill, fg action makes rvr going, the more fg's running around, the more zergs there are out, and that benifits all 3 realms, just look at avalon.

Most ppl just like to play in a fg and have constant action. this wasnt the case anymore on cluster so people went slowly to avalon/lyo/us/freeshard servers.

I bet if you would ask them all ( would you like to play on cluster again if there are lots of ppl on it ? ) they would probably all say yes

But Requiel, in one of your post you said exca/pryd cluster was still very much alive and cluster wasnt needed.
Explain to me why you cluster'd avalon and lyo then? There pop was like 4 times higher then on the english cluster and still you decide to cluster them and leave exca/pryd cluster like it was ... i mean either im just stupid but where's the logic in clustering 2 servers that have realy high population, and leave the one that realy needs it alone? I can only think of 1 thing that might be the reason and thats if its not possible, but you cant find any record of that so.. :/

I may be wrong but im sure i read somewhere about Mythic designing the new patches for clustered servers , so goa clustered the german ones so they could patch them easier.

 

[Kinag]

I don't even see the reason behind this post.

What are you hoping to achieve Requiel?

More bad mouthing and starting the conversation all over again?

The problem is that the TT issue (which you clearly do not want mentioned again) is a part of the big picture.

Your definition of griefplay obviously does not go hand in hand with other's definition of griefplay.

I can't see what you're hoping to accomplish cause all you're doing is making another discussion which has happened over and over and over again.

Some don't give a rats ass about other players, while those who actually care just a little bit can't do anything about it.

As an alb I found AC raids to be a boring as hell as it not only excluded me from the raid, but it's been done so many times to piss of others.

Personally I got sick of the relics changing hand over a night, and see hard work being undone by a few people over a couple of hours at night, when 90% of the server population were at sleep.

 

[kirennia]

Why do some people insist on hearing more from Requiel about this part? Think he has bin quite fair saying that personally he did find AC'ing lame. You can't however expect him/Goa to do something about it, unless this become's a point for more servers? Wouldnt this be something for Mythic/EA to change?

I'm not saying he's been unfair, in fact I think the fact he's posted on here about such a deep problem with the servers community is a fantastic thing.

I can't expect him to do anything such as saying sod mythic/EA and implement features which break the laws of the contract, of course not. I just hope that this is being discussed with EA/mythic at least because I'm pretty sure situations like this can be resolved with some simple common sense. Add more guards to keeps with relics in them when your realm has certain percentages less of a population online. That'd go a very long way in fixing a situation which I can see destroying more clusters/servers then just our own.

It's not upto GoA to implement these changes but as our representatives for the entire of Europe, it IS upto them to as least inform EA/mythic of problems and maybe suggest some changes which would help alleviate these problems.

Put simply, EA/mythic haven't had problems such as we now experience with the 'duvyt' server because they can still cluster more and more. The only time they'll run into these problems is when all american servers of one type (classic/normal/pvp etc) are clustered and the low population faces the difficulties we faced. Of course by then, it'll be way way too late for us in europe.

 

[uspe]

Peeps have always done it, guess what's different lately is it's not an occasional thing that happens when peeps of one realm get bored but a grp of albs who make a career out of it.

let me recontrusct you phrase my friend :

ac raids were - are and will be done till mythic says daoc ---> shut down
the only difference is were not a big issue as it is now because low population at thease days.

anyway one more thing before closing. Kagata said the most perfect and wise thing so far in FH : care less about relics and you will be more happy.

 

[Shike]

thats like saying, skip 10% meleedamage in your template, it doesnt matter and just be happy...

it doesnt really work that way for everyone. Kagato has his way of seeing things and well, I disagree with alot of his opinions. He think relics doesnt matter, I think they do. Simple..